Finally! I don't care if it's apple or someone else, but the "no blackouts" thing is big. Nothing drives me more crazy than being unable to stream a game because I happen to live in the same geographic region as the team home field. This would finally motivate me to cancel the cable TV subscription - the only sport I watch is soccer, and the only reason I keep the cable TV is so I can dig out the remote whenever the dumb blackout rules prevent me from watching it via streaming.
> This would finally motivate me to cancel the cable TV subscription
Which is exactly why blackouts exist. Live tv is pretty much solely about sports and 24 hour news channels now. The big four sports leagues all make billions a year off their TV deals. Giving up blackouts would absolutely hamstring them.
Hard to believe the other leagues will give up blackouts until they are confident they can run their own streaming service and cash in on that micro gambling revenue. Can you imagine how much money the NFL would make if people were gambling $.10-1 on every play?
> the dumb blackout rules prevent me from watching it via streaming
The blackout MLS rules are really dumb. For example, I het my normal TV through DirecTV stream. My local MLS club (FC Cincinnati) airs their local broadcast on a local over the air channel. This channel is also on my DirecTV subscription.
However, because I get my “TV” streamed over the internet and not through a satellite dish or cable, all local MLS games were blacked out for me. I pay for local TV access, but even when the game was broadcast over the air, I would get blacked out because of how I got the TV access.
This was just dumb.
I specifically got a network OTA tuner just for this purpose, but getting rid of blackout rules entirely would be fantastic.
MLB next, please. I don't have cable, which means I just don't watch baseball right now. I would 100% sign up for MLB.tv if I could watch my two favorite teams play.
The game-changer for them, IMO, is to buy the rights to broadcast Pac-12 and Big-10 football (and ideally all sports).
I am an avid college football fan. Trying to find games to watch is a pain without some sort of lame ass subscription somewhere. I already pay for Apple TV + because it's bundled with other services that I use.
With the incoming threat of ESPN + Disney + SEC fracturing the college football landscape, Apple could provide the money, reach, and power to take some of the sport (and country's) biggest brands and put them front and center in front of millions and basically compete head-on with Disney. Next step is you broadcast all of the NCAA sports - baseball and volleyball championships, etc. Take what the Big-10 and Pac-12 channels were supposed to be and make them great and unbundled from cable TV.
In the coming years I think they're going to add live news with a focus on "quality journalism" as well. The Jon Stewart show and documentaries they are producing are the first drip.
Even if Apple just carried all Pac-12 network football games, that would really move the needle. The Pac-12 network is pretty much impossible to get through traditional cable providers outside of the west coast.
I doubt either of those conferences would want to be stuck behind a paywall that is neither on terrestrial television or cable networks. Dealing with ESPN is dealing with ABC, which is a gigantic advantage. The SEC remains the power conference of power conferences, and whatever they decide is ultimately the way college football will trend. Their recent agreements with Oklahoma and the University of Texas are just a start into deraveling the top tier athletic institutions from other conferences.
I'm really curious as to what Apple's broader strategy is with live sports, since that's typically been one of the last big reasons to keep a cable subscription. However, given that Apple TV Plus is going to have at least some MLB games[1] and is rumored to possibly be the new home for the NFL Sunday Ticket[2], they could be seeking to make it the must-have subscription for fans of live sports.
There is a lot i don't understand about how they view things in Cupertino.
I mean, there must be a lot of people at Apple thinking about the future - what it will look like, how media is consumed and then again how Apple can own that pipeline and ecosystem.
Both on the media side, hardware side and software side the offering is lacking in ways i find very strange coming from Apple.
For instance why haven't Apple just gotten the internet broadcast rights to a lot of sports to build a moat around it - not because it is popular but because they can. With Apples finances they could also get alot of popular sports on Apple TV as well.
Why didn't Apple buy any movie studios to kickstart Apple TV and get a big catalogue from the get go - seems like a no brainer.
Apple does a lot of stuff right, but there are more than a few areas where they fail to really provide value.
There is a lot of latent demand for people who just want to simply stream a game without having to pirate it or get worked around by the leagues. Most people I know today do it on illegal streams or share an mlb/nfl password with everyone they possibly know. Imagine if you monetized that market. The leagues are clearly too petty and incompetent to do it right, but Apple could make it really user friendly.
it's likely a loss leader strategy to get subscription numbers up. the long term goal is to replace cable... with cable-like appletv+. they're not expanding the pie, but rather fighting to capture existing pie, particularly against netflix & amazon, who they see as more direct competitors than traditional media companies. apple likes lives sports because there's no fan base to build up, and they get to just be a distributor (similar to music) rather than a content creator (which is a harder and riskier business). they don't like giving up editorial control, but they need the subscriber base.
frankly, i'm not a fan of this strategy as there's no synergy between the computing and content businesses, but apple has fallen for the relentless march to grow at all costs, and sees content as low-hanging fruit for them (again, i disagree with this assessment).
apple home, car, glasses, etc. make much more sense, but those are too slow growing for both professional and unprofessional investors alike.
It also gives them a compelling way to tier their service & grow revenue from existing subscribers.
From this perspective, something like Sunday Ticket makes a lot of sense even with the hefty price tag, so long as they’re allowed to parcel out those games as they’d like.
This is probably one of the best decision by any TV provider.
MLS is going to blow up in the coming years. There is a lot of talk about US national team being very competitive in 2026 World Cup. MLS has produced stars already, like Alphonso Davies.
Once the hype gets higher and more money start being spent on soccer in the US, it will become a power house.
- Streamed over AppleTV so presumably very high quality
- No need for an AppleTV subscription
- No blackouts for local since local no longer exists
- Simulcast with linear Fox/ESPN/UDN without blackouts so no need for cable/YTTV
- Free with an MLS season ticket
This seems like the best thing ever. This seems better than the old MLSLive back in the early days of (unpirated) soccer streaming when NBC Sports Gold was free.
If they let you stream old games and don't remove them after a week or two that would be perfection.
If AppleTV brings quality to it, that could wind up being a major selling point, right now just the quality of the stream is often pretty poor and looks very second-class with MLS (and don't get me started on the twitter simulcasts with the UDN games).
Oh. Major League Soccer, not Multiple Listing Service for real estate.
Back in 2008, Google Maps had an overlay for foreclosures, so you could look at all the foreclosures in an area at once. The real estate industry hated that.
I hope this sets the standard for sports streaming moving forward. The way NBC packages the Premier League in the US is an absolute joke because of the broadcast restrictions they impose. I just want simplicity and access in my streaming service and I'm willing to pay for it.
Yeah, no blackouts is good. I find it hard to be optimistic about deals like this but maybe, just maybe, this sets some precedent for deals for other sports. Trying to navigate NHL and especially MLB blackouts is really obnoxious.
> The MLS live and on-demand content on the Apple TV app will be available to anyone with internet access across all devices where the app can be found, including iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV 4K, and Apple TV HD; Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Sony, TCL, VIZIO, and other smart TVs; Amazon Fire TV and Roku devices; PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles; Chromecast with Google TV; and Comcast Xfinity. Fans can also watch on tv.apple.com.
The wide platform availability is an absolute win. Are there any big streaming dongles / systems that aren't covered here?
I would love to go back in time and tell my grandfather in the 1980s, who despite his age was pretty enamored with technology, that all of this newfangled stuff would actually make it more difficult for him to watch sports. You get cool and sleek looking "set top" devices, but oh sorry there's a labyrinth of "streaming" subscriptions you have to navigate to figure out how to watch your games. At some point, this kind of thing isn't helpful. I can steelman an argument that Apple and MLS doing this on a 10-year timeline at least gives us some consistency for where to go to watch MLS games (I'm not an MLS fan, I don't know how you'd watch it today), but more and more I give up on trying to figure out how to watch a NHL or MLB game without setting up some VPN to get around the blackout restrictions, and just pull out an old radio and listen on AM. I figure eventually that will go away too.
> more and more I give up on trying to figure out how to watch a NHL or MLB game without setting up some VPN to get around the blackout restrictions
The point of this deal is that there are no blackout restrictions. Every game is on the service, regardless of where you are worldwide. If you want to watch MLS games, you subscribe to this Apple service, and whether you are in the parking lot outside the stadium or in Indonesia, the game is on it.
None of your complaints have to do with technology. No one is stopping NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL/MLS/US Tennis/etc from adding a button on their website or app that lets you pay and watch a game.
The thing stopping you from watching it easily is those organizations preferring to outsource broadcasting and ad sales to other media sellers who demand exclusivity terms that make it harder for you to watch.
I agree. Each entity pulling its material so it can launch it on its own platform (recent example: Paramount Plus), is ridiculous. 10 different streaming services, a good £80+ a month. Each with its own app that has a different look & feel and navigation.
May as well just go back to the 1 provider model (cable/sat). At least you’ve only got 1 EPG etc to deal with.
I’ll add that this fragmentation also encourages piracy.
There’s a great business opportunity for a startup of they can strike deals with all streaming services & offer a single view/epg/site that presents all of the services you’re subscribed to in a single consistent way.
I was pretty young, but from what I remember of the 80s, other than Monday Night Football and playoffs, it was not possible to watch anything but local games at all, and many of the local games required add-on cable packages. Also, MLS didn't yet exist, so it wasn't possible to watch any MLS games at all.
The blackout restrictions suck where they apply, but at the same time, as a person who doesn't live in his hometown, without satellite or streaming packages, I wouldn't be able to watch the teams I care about at all except when they visit the teams that play where I live.
Steve Jobs was a visionary product guy but he’s no match for Tim Cook when it comes to being the CEO of a big company. Tim Apple is just built different.
I am 100% sure Apple sees owning these rights and the Apple TV+ content factory in general as, in part, a way to fuel the demand for more sophisticated media consumption and production technologies through their devices.
Unless they decide to can the whole effort, it’s now obvious that the sports experience via Apple TV+ is going to be part of the VR headset story.
“This partnership is a historic first for a major professional sports league, and will allow fans around the world to watch all MLS, Leagues Cup,1 and select MLS NEXT Pro and MLS NEXT matches in one place — without any local broadcast blackouts or the need for a traditional pay TV bundle.”
The “around the world” part is huge for the MLS (and to a lesser extent for Apple). I’m in Europe and I’ve never watched an MLS game. But it looks like it’ll be the first and only football league that I’ll be able to watch in a civilized way so I’ll definitely give it a try.
Every soccer league is on a different provider. I'm in Canada. The Premier League is on DAZN. MLS is on Apple TV. La Liga is on fuboTV (or Amazon Prime). It's all the same sport. Multiply that by X if another family member is interested another sport. I don't know what the future holds, but the sports entertainment fragmentation might be hurting more than helping. Perhaps Apple is on their way to consolidate.
Over here in europe you need multiple providers for the same competition since the rights are split. Champions League football (as in soccer) requires a Sky, DAZN and Amazon Prime subscription if you want to see all matches (of your favorite club). Same thing with most domestic leagues.
"From early 2023 through 2032, fans can get every live MLS match by subscribing to a new MLS streaming service, available exclusively through the Apple TV app."
So the only way to watch MLS games is by subscribing to the MLS streaming service? Am I reading this right?
What do I get for my subscription during the off-season?
I hope companies start doing this in European leagues. It's going to be difficult but I don't want to be forced to use an ISP and pay €150 per month to watch 4 matches of my team. I hope stream reduces these costs. DAZN is doing some improvements on this path, but it's still not enough.
Assuming there's no super-fine print that somehow says otherwise and can be enacted on a whim, making sure there's no broadcast restrictions is very smart.
I've wanted to use NBA league pass in the past to follow my team, and the crazy broadcast restrictions meant that on the rare occasion I had the time to watch a game, it was a shot in the dark as to whether or not I'd actually be able to. On many occasions it was very upsetting to have an evening to myself wanting to simply watch a game I felt I paid for and to find out my game wasn't actually available after all.
I understand that the sports leagues customers are really the cable channels who pay them big cash for the broadcast rights, but this kind of thing was a big part of what killed my extreme enthusiasm for pro sports.
I think there is some confusion. Apple is not making MLS games available as part of AppleTV+ - the streaming service - it will be available as a channel that you pay extra for within the AppleTV app.
And the AppleTV app is available on most streaming devices including the AppleTV hardware device.
[+] [-] porcoda|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foogazi|3 years ago|reply
Wow missed that - very big deal
I have the MLB package and blackouts drive me nuts - I’m not even in the Bay Area, but close enough to not be able to watch Giants or A’s home games,
Than it’s already starting to fragment: some Friday games on AppleTV, some weekend games on Peacock
And MLB.tv doesn’t carry playoff games
[+] [-] colinmhayes|3 years ago|reply
Which is exactly why blackouts exist. Live tv is pretty much solely about sports and 24 hour news channels now. The big four sports leagues all make billions a year off their TV deals. Giving up blackouts would absolutely hamstring them.
Hard to believe the other leagues will give up blackouts until they are confident they can run their own streaming service and cash in on that micro gambling revenue. Can you imagine how much money the NFL would make if people were gambling $.10-1 on every play?
[+] [-] mbreese|3 years ago|reply
The blackout MLS rules are really dumb. For example, I het my normal TV through DirecTV stream. My local MLS club (FC Cincinnati) airs their local broadcast on a local over the air channel. This channel is also on my DirecTV subscription.
However, because I get my “TV” streamed over the internet and not through a satellite dish or cable, all local MLS games were blacked out for me. I pay for local TV access, but even when the game was broadcast over the air, I would get blacked out because of how I got the TV access.
This was just dumb.
I specifically got a network OTA tuner just for this purpose, but getting rid of blackout rules entirely would be fantastic.
[+] [-] jayknight|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oluwie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|3 years ago|reply
ESPN, MLS' current partner, is mediocre at best.
Now if only the PHL Union can replace JP Dellecamera. Somehow he manages to make The Beautiful Game sound ugly.
[+] [-] al_borland|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericmay|3 years ago|reply
The game-changer for them, IMO, is to buy the rights to broadcast Pac-12 and Big-10 football (and ideally all sports).
I am an avid college football fan. Trying to find games to watch is a pain without some sort of lame ass subscription somewhere. I already pay for Apple TV + because it's bundled with other services that I use.
With the incoming threat of ESPN + Disney + SEC fracturing the college football landscape, Apple could provide the money, reach, and power to take some of the sport (and country's) biggest brands and put them front and center in front of millions and basically compete head-on with Disney. Next step is you broadcast all of the NCAA sports - baseball and volleyball championships, etc. Take what the Big-10 and Pac-12 channels were supposed to be and make them great and unbundled from cable TV.
In the coming years I think they're going to add live news with a focus on "quality journalism" as well. The Jon Stewart show and documentaries they are producing are the first drip.
[+] [-] bachmeier|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bgorman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dgritsko|3 years ago|reply
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/03/apple-and-mlb-announc...
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-tv-plus-could-become-ho...
[+] [-] Seanambers|3 years ago|reply
I mean, there must be a lot of people at Apple thinking about the future - what it will look like, how media is consumed and then again how Apple can own that pipeline and ecosystem.
Both on the media side, hardware side and software side the offering is lacking in ways i find very strange coming from Apple.
For instance why haven't Apple just gotten the internet broadcast rights to a lot of sports to build a moat around it - not because it is popular but because they can. With Apples finances they could also get alot of popular sports on Apple TV as well.
Why didn't Apple buy any movie studios to kickstart Apple TV and get a big catalogue from the get go - seems like a no brainer.
Apple does a lot of stuff right, but there are more than a few areas where they fail to really provide value.
[+] [-] asdff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clairity|3 years ago|reply
frankly, i'm not a fan of this strategy as there's no synergy between the computing and content businesses, but apple has fallen for the relentless march to grow at all costs, and sees content as low-hanging fruit for them (again, i disagree with this assessment).
apple home, car, glasses, etc. make much more sense, but those are too slow growing for both professional and unprofessional investors alike.
[+] [-] twoodfin|3 years ago|reply
From this perspective, something like Sunday Ticket makes a lot of sense even with the hefty price tag, so long as they’re allowed to parcel out those games as they’d like.
[+] [-] avgDev|3 years ago|reply
MLS is going to blow up in the coming years. There is a lot of talk about US national team being very competitive in 2026 World Cup. MLS has produced stars already, like Alphonso Davies.
Once the hype gets higher and more money start being spent on soccer in the US, it will become a power house.
[+] [-] lamontcg|3 years ago|reply
- Streamed over AppleTV so presumably very high quality
- No need for an AppleTV subscription
- No blackouts for local since local no longer exists
- Simulcast with linear Fox/ESPN/UDN without blackouts so no need for cable/YTTV
- Free with an MLS season ticket
This seems like the best thing ever. This seems better than the old MLSLive back in the early days of (unpirated) soccer streaming when NBC Sports Gold was free.
If they let you stream old games and don't remove them after a week or two that would be perfection.
If AppleTV brings quality to it, that could wind up being a major selling point, right now just the quality of the stream is often pretty poor and looks very second-class with MLS (and don't get me started on the twitter simulcasts with the UDN games).
[+] [-] darknavi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
Back in 2008, Google Maps had an overlay for foreclosures, so you could look at all the foreclosures in an area at once. The real estate industry hated that.
[+] [-] NonNefarious|3 years ago|reply
I'll bet that holds true for the vast majority of U.S. citizens who've even heard of anything called "MLS."
[+] [-] thr0wawayf00|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00fus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remarkEon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Empact|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shank|3 years ago|reply
The wide platform availability is an absolute win. Are there any big streaming dongles / systems that aren't covered here?
[+] [-] remarkEon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdminhbg|3 years ago|reply
The point of this deal is that there are no blackout restrictions. Every game is on the service, regardless of where you are worldwide. If you want to watch MLS games, you subscribe to this Apple service, and whether you are in the parking lot outside the stadium or in Indonesia, the game is on it.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|3 years ago|reply
The thing stopping you from watching it easily is those organizations preferring to outsource broadcasting and ad sales to other media sellers who demand exclusivity terms that make it harder for you to watch.
[+] [-] trollied|3 years ago|reply
May as well just go back to the 1 provider model (cable/sat). At least you’ve only got 1 EPG etc to deal with.
I’ll add that this fragmentation also encourages piracy.
There’s a great business opportunity for a startup of they can strike deals with all streaming services & offer a single view/epg/site that presents all of the services you’re subscribed to in a single consistent way.
[+] [-] nonameiguess|3 years ago|reply
The blackout restrictions suck where they apply, but at the same time, as a person who doesn't live in his hometown, without satellite or streaming packages, I wouldn't be able to watch the teams I care about at all except when they visit the teams that play where I live.
[+] [-] 30944836|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] retskrad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiffanyh|3 years ago|reply
In the USA at least, there's virtually no 4K sports broadcasts of any kind (including Apple/MLB is only 1080p).
[+] [-] twoodfin|3 years ago|reply
Unless they decide to can the whole effort, it’s now obvious that the sports experience via Apple TV+ is going to be part of the VR headset story.
[+] [-] TheTrotters|3 years ago|reply
The “around the world” part is huge for the MLS (and to a lesser extent for Apple). I’m in Europe and I’ve never watched an MLS game. But it looks like it’ll be the first and only football league that I’ll be able to watch in a civilized way so I’ll definitely give it a try.
[+] [-] tamersalama|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thirdsun|3 years ago|reply
Over here in europe you need multiple providers for the same competition since the rights are split. Champions League football (as in soccer) requires a Sky, DAZN and Amazon Prime subscription if you want to see all matches (of your favorite club). Same thing with most domestic leagues.
[+] [-] rsweeney21|3 years ago|reply
So the only way to watch MLS games is by subscribing to the MLS streaming service? Am I reading this right?
What do I get for my subscription during the off-season?
How do you attract new MLS fans?
[+] [-] corderop|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logicalmonster|3 years ago|reply
I've wanted to use NBA league pass in the past to follow my team, and the crazy broadcast restrictions meant that on the rare occasion I had the time to watch a game, it was a shot in the dark as to whether or not I'd actually be able to. On many occasions it was very upsetting to have an evening to myself wanting to simply watch a game I felt I paid for and to find out my game wasn't actually available after all.
I understand that the sports leagues customers are really the cable channels who pay them big cash for the broadcast rights, but this kind of thing was a big part of what killed my extreme enthusiasm for pro sports.
[+] [-] scarface74|3 years ago|reply
And the AppleTV app is available on most streaming devices including the AppleTV hardware device.