CNBC: ‘NFL Sunday Ticket Still Up for Grabs as Apple Pushes for Flexibility With Game Rights’

Alex Sherman, reporting for CNBC:

Apple isn’t interested in simply acting as a conduit for broadcasting games, according to Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services. Cue oversees Apple’s media and sports partnerships and its streaming service, Apple TV+. Apple is looking for partnerships with sports leagues in which it can offer consumers more than standard rights agreements — such as having free rein to offer games globally or in local markets. Apple has that type of deal with Major League Soccer, a 10-year partnership that begins in 2023.

“We weren’t interested in buying sports rights,” Cue said this week at a Paley Center for Media panel in New York. “There’s all kinds of capabilities that we’re going to be able to do together because we have everything together. And so if I have a great idea, I don’t have to think about, OK, well, my contract or the deal of interest will allow this.”

The iPhone maker is MLS’s exclusive broadcast partner, though some linear networks may buy simulcast rights to the soccer league’s games. The pact allows Apple to stream every game of every season for the next 10 years globally. It plans to build MLS steaming capabilities into its apps, such as Apple News.

Surely Apple has no belief that it can secure terms from the NFL similar to what it has with MLS. But Apple, from all accounts I’ve ever read or heard about from sources, always plays hardball with all negotiations. It’s part of the company’s DNA to demand the moon. And the Sunday Ticket package is apparently going to sell for billions of dollars per year. That’s real money, by anyone’s standards. But the NFL is the undisputed king of U.S. sports, and is accustomed to getting whatever it wants from its broadcast (and now streaming) partners.

Apple clearly wants to get deeper into streaming sports, and the NFL likes spreading its rights around between the major TV networks and streaming platforms. All things considered, it seems clear that the NFL would prefer for Apple to buy the Sunday Ticket rights. But neither party needs the other. Oh to be a fly on the wall for these negotiations.

★ Monday, 17 October 2022