Linked List: July 25, 2023

Tuesday, 25 July 2023

Apple’s MLS Deal Seems to Be Doing Well ★

John Ourand and Alex Silverman, reporting for Sports Business Journal:

As Apple’s Eddy Cue began speaking to a room filled with MLS owners and executives last week in Washington, D.C., he harked back to conversations he had with league officials a year earlier, just as Apple was signing a 10-year deal for the league’s media rights.

At that time, Cue recalled last Wednesday, when several MLS owners and league executives came up to him and asked what the teams could do to help ensure that the groundbreaking deal was successful, Cue would offer the same response — sign good players.

Addressing the MLS board of governors just days before the world’s greatest soccer player, Lionel Messi, would debut for Inter Miami CF, Cue smiled and told the group of MLS owners and officials, “Boy did you deliver.”

Messi’s debut on Friday was spectacularly dramatic — a game-winning free kick in extra time. If you put that in a movie script people would roll their eyes.

The number of MLS Season Pass subscribers is a closely guarded secret. Viewership figures for individual games are never shared publicly. Multiple high-level club business executives said they were required by [Apple, sic] to sign non-disclosure agreements in order to see any numbers pertaining to the number of MLS Season Pass subscribers. [...]

Sources said MLS Season Pass is approaching 1 million subscribers, a number that includes season-ticket holders who are provided access as part of their purchase. In early June, those same sources had the MLS Season Pass subscriber base at 700,000, which league executives believe shows good growth, and they expect that number to balloon even further once Messi starts playing.

One of the striking differences between traditional TV broadcasting and streaming — not just for sports, but everything — is that with traditional TV, viewership ratings are public. The networks brag about high ratings. With streaming, viewership is a tightly-held secret. Is 1 million subscribers an accurate count for MLS Season Pass? Only Apple knows. Is that a good number? It’s hard to say, because the NFL, NBA, and MLB keep the numbers for their equivalent subscription packages secret too.

Threads Now Has a Chronological Timeline ★

Threads:

The For you feed includes a mix of posts from profiles you follow and recommended accounts. Following shows you posts from profiles you’re following, starting with the most recent.

To switch from For you to Following, tap on the Threads icon at the top of your feed and swipe.

Threads launched strong and is steadily improving each week. (Tip: If you update to the new version and don’t see the new Following tab, force-quit the app and relaunch. That did the trick for me.) The one bummer: Threads will default back to the For You timeline when you re-launch the app. Not surprising, given that Instagram does the same. (To get to the Following timeline in Instagram, tap the Instagram logo of the Home tab; that presents a menu with options for “Following” and “Favorites”. This is fairly described as a “hidden feature” given that the Instagram logo doesn’t look like a drop-down menu until after you’ve tapped it, at which point they display downward chevron.)

The much-requested Threads web app is coming soon, apparently.

Republican Counties Had Higher COVID Death Rates After Vaccines Became Available ★

Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason L. Schwartz, in a paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine, “Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic”:

Between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2021, there were 538,159 individuals in Ohio and Florida who died at age 25 years or older in the study sample. The median age at death was 78 years (IQR, 71-89 years). Overall, the excess death rate for Republican voters was 2.8 percentage points, or 15%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters (95% prediction interval [PI], 1.6-3.7 percentage points). After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from −0.9 percentage point (95% PI, −2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. The gap in excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates and was primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.

This study strongly suggests that the only thing that mattered regarding COVID mortality was vaccination. Also, COVID was/is a disease that largely kills the elderly — the excess mortality in this study was entirely amongst people 75 and older. Even amongst those 65–74, excess mortality was down. All the other policy differences between Republican and Democratic-leaning counties made for no difference in mortality rates before vaccines were available.

I’m not sure what to make of the fact that the excess death rate was pronounced only in Ohio, and not Florida. The study itself doesn’t seem to offer a hypothesis for that discrepancy. Perhaps weather? Old people in Ohio spent more time indoors, where COVID is far more likely to spread?

(Via Political Wire.)