Apple Joins The Ad World With Commercial-Filled Friday Night Baseball

After years of conversations and more than a decade of other kinds of sports partnerships, the world’s most valuable public company finally began live streaming an actual game on Friday night, with two exclusive Major League Baseball contests.

And a bunch of ads. A BUNCH of ads.

That’s notable because Apple so far has seemed indifferent to the value of gathering user data for targeting advertising, especially on its ubiquitous iOS mobile platform but also with connected TVs. On iPhones and iPads, the company’s decision to stop allowing IDFA tags in its browser kneecapped Meta’s Facebook and Instagram among social-media companies that had relied on the data to extract far higher CPMs from ad clients.

And yes, Apple does receive a hefty check from Alphabet each year to make Google the default search engine on its platforms, giving Google access to the search data of hundreds of millions of Apple users.

But Apple has generally made its hostility to most advertising a key part of marketing, with strong language asserting that privacy is a human right.

So, Friday Night Baseball’s first games on Apple TV+ were subtly a big deal, setting all kinds of precedents. The first game, between the New York Mets and division rival Washington Nationals, was not only the first live-streamed sports event on Apple TV+, but it was also the first live event of any kind on the platform (other than slickly produced product announcements).

Ads studded the games themselves, the pre-game shows, the initial delay caused by stadium-lighting issues, and everything in between. It felt, with respect to advertising, like the kind of telecast you could have watched anytime over the past couple of decades, though with a more diverse broadcast booth and some nice interface wrinkles like better stats and crisp video.

Advertisers included The Usual Suspects: GEICO, Budweiser, the Marines, Subway, etc. And given that it’s 2022, a blockchain-technology company bought a series of ads promoting its NFT-based digital baseball cards.

Given the plentitude of ad slots and hours-long games, Apple had plenty of opportunity to promote its own products and programming too. Each team’s bench was provided iPads for players to review at-bat videos, pitcher information and the like, as announcers pointed out multiple times. And critically lauded Apple TV+ shows such as Slow Horses and Severance were given lengthy promotional ads not often seen on other outlets.

Amusingly, Game 2’s Houston Astros even featured a player, Jose Siri, who shares a name with Apple’s digital assistant. And the on-screen graphics used (as type nerds noted) was Apple’s sans-serif font San Francisco, keeping the interface very on-brand for Apple.

The most self-referentially Apple moment, though, actually came from an unlikely source—Washington’s ebullient young superstar Juan Soto. During a live pre-game interview, he laughingly said, “I'd like to have Apple TV for everyone on my team.”  Apple soon passed along word to announcers that the streaming devices were on their way, establishing an almost certain trend among MLB teams appearing on Friday nights.

Apple announced the Friday Night Baseball deal in early March, with a subsequent report from Forbes that said Apple is paying $85 million per year for the rights, including $30 million in advertising. Apple has the right to exit the seven-year deal early after each of the first two years.

The deal includes not only two exclusive Friday night games available in the U.S. and eight other countries each week, but also access to MLB Big Inning, an every-weeknight live show featuring highlights and look-ins, along with access in the United States and Canada to a new livestream that features replays, news, highlights, classic games, and on-demand programming featuring baseball themed original content.

Other streaming services are also grabbing pieces of the MLB programming pie this season. Peacock carved out a deal for 18 Sunday-morning broadcasts (including an eye-rubbing 8:30 am start time on the West Coast) that begins in May.

Amazon, meanwhile, secured exclusive rights to 21 Yankees games, a deal no doubt eased by the e-commerce giant’s participation with Sinclair and the Yankees in buying the YES Network three years ago.

The deals come at a time when viewership on legacy broadcast and cable outlets has dropped ever lower, though in-park attendance remains steady.

Baseball also attracts an older crowd, with a median age of 57, especially compared to other pro sports such as football (50) and basketball (a positively spritely 42).

No surprise that the aging Boomer audience overwhelmingly prefers to watch baseball and other video on old-school broadcast and cable services. In fact, a YouGuv survey found that 81% of baseball fans prefer to watch on legacy outlets, and only 26% watch online streamed games at all.

That, my friends, constitutes a problem for a sport already saddled with a backward-looking reputation in far too many areas. It’s possible the deal with Apple and the other streamers will start to draw even the Grumpy Old People online at least a little bit, perhaps opening up further growth potential for the streamers among a stubbornly non-technical audience segment.

The bigger issues may be for Apple itself, as it navigates to a new future for its undersized streaming service. Apple TV+ now has multiple Emmys, including best comedy for Ted Lasso last fall, and Oscars, including Best Picture for CODA last month. Its shelf of originals-only programming is finally getting hefty enough to keep consumers around. Baseball will help with one corner of that audience.

More importantly, it’s difficult to believe Apple will stop here with ad-supported live sports programming. It’s one of the top bidders for the NFL Sunday Ticket package (though Amazon is said to be leading). When other sports rights come available, Apple certainly has the bottomless wallet and indifference to immediate cost-benefit analysis to make other companies’ bids look positively puny.

How, for instance, will just-emerged Warner Bros. Discovery handle its next rounds of sports-rights bidding on the NBA, NHL and March Madness, while also cutting $55 billion in debt, competing for scripted programming and unscripted formats, and rationalizing multiple streaming platforms into one system? What does Paramount Global do?

Will Apple consider creating an ad-supported tier of Apple TV+, like most of its major competitors other than Netflix? What does that look like? What does it mean for a service focused on high-quality originals rather than a vast library of cheap older shows to keep customers around?

Does its dip into sports advertising undercut any part of its privacy position? If so, is it missing an opportunity to maximize ad revenues, and is that an acceptable price to pay? The potential conflict is already playing out in small ways.

For instance, tell subscription service Apple News+ your favorite team, and it will automatically populate your feed with video highlights from the most recent game. The one hang-up: you have to watch a broadcast-style (and -length) ad before you can see the clip. As YouTube and TikTok long ago figured out, people will have little patience for watching a 30-second ad on their phone in exchange for watching a context-free 37-second highlight clip.

So, Friday Night Baseball’s first night represents an important landmark in Apple TV+ history, with some promising moments, annoying glitches, and interesting extensions of the traditional game-watching experience. But it also represents a big step in a very new direction for both Apple and its two-year-old streaming service. Where it goes next could help redefine the world’s most valuable public company in striking ways.