After recruiting new executives and beefing up its advertising division earlier this year, Apple reportedly held talks with the U.K.’s TV ratings body, Barb Audiences Ltd.

According to The Telegraph, executives from Apple met with Barb in recent weeks to discuss potential data-collection options for tracking advertisements on Apple TV Plus.

Barb is known for publishing viewing stats on the U.K.’s four major broadcasters — BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky — and already provides Apple with similar streaming data.

While Barb records ratings for the streaming service, as well as other major U.K. programmers, monitoring advertising results would require additional, more complex data tracking.

If Apple wants to follow in the footsteps of its competitors and attract a higher volume of curious customers, though, selling advertisements on Apple TV Plus in exchange for a reduced price tag is likely the way to go.

In fact, a report published earlier this month by Bloomberg indicated that Apple TV Plus generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.

The lack of an ad-supported plan for curious customers also is partly to blame for the streaming service's stagnant subscriber growth, according to Bloomberg.

The Telegraph didn’t specify whether Apple is considering a cheaper tier than its standard $10-per-month subscription, or whether it intends to introduce ads to existing subscribers.

The meeting comes just a few months after the tech giant hired Joseph Cady, a former advertising executive at NBCUniversal to pad out its ad division.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Netflix has sent emails to customers using older Apple TV devices that app support for second- and third-generation Apple TV models, those introduced between 2010 - 2013, will end on July 31. 

Netflix is also noting this sunsetting on its Apple TV support page. 

Of course, computational devices become obsolete all the time due to the natural evolution of the software that runs on them. Apple itself even stops supporting its gadgets with operating system upgrades after seven years. 

This particular obsolescence is notable, however, because these Apple TV devices were so groundbreaking.

Introduced in September 2010, the second generation, 720p-resolution-capable Apple TV was one of the first streaming devices to use 8 gigabytes of flash storage instead of an internal hard drive -- a configuration that became universal among streaming gadgets. It also used Apple's A4 chip instead of an Intel x86 processor. 

In conjunction with the Gen-2 release, Apple also renamed AirTunes as "AirPlay," supporting streaming video from iPhones, iPads and Mac computers. 

The 1080p-capable third-generation Apple TV, which arrived in March 2012, was identical in outward appearance to the second-generation model, but included an upgraded A5 processor, as well as support for remote access via HomeKit devices. 

Both were priced at a $150 MSRP at introduction. And both will soon be bricked by the world's biggest subscription streaming service. 

In 2004, Apple introduced an exciting new technology, AirTunes, that let users of Apple devices stream music to third party gadgets.

Twenty years later, the legacy of that breakthrough, AirPlay, is finally serving one of its seemingly more practical real-world applications, with Apple announcing AirPlay support in the guest rooms of 160 IHS Hotel and Resort properties in North America. 

The IHS chain includes Holiday Inn, Candlewood Suites and Avid Hotels. IHS has a list of its properties that support AirPlay on this page. 

The technology will enable users of Apple devices including iPhones and iPads to stream video from their own apps to LG smart TVs situated in IHS rooms. (LG started integrating support for AirPlay 2 in its TVs back in 2019.) 

Guests merely need to connect their Apple device to the hotel's WiFi network, then scan a QR code on their in-room television for authentication and setup. 

Apple first announced that AirPlay was coming to hotel rooms at its Worldwide Developers Conference last year, and the feature debuted with the introduction of iOS 17.3 earlier this year. 

The deployment of Apple's screen-sharing technology address a growing demand among hotel guests, who are craving more control of their media consumption in the age of personalized on-demand streaming ... and are often choosing vacation rental apps like Airbnb or Vrbo instead of hotels to gain that freedom. 

Back in October 2018, Netflix stopped letting new users, who had downloaded the Netflix app to their iPhone or iPad, use Apple's native in-app billing system for these devices to pay for their subscription. 

With Apple taking 15% - 30% of revenue, Netflix told all new users to render payment method for their streaming service directly on its website. Users who'd already signed up for Netflix through Apple's App Store could keep paying via Apple until they cancelled their subscription, however. 

But it appears Netflix has lost patience with these Apple device users on several fronts. 

This week, the streaming company began notifying legacy Apple-paying users in countries including the U.S. and Canada, telling them they need to enter their credit or debit card directly into Netflix's database and stop paying with Apple. 

Netflix reps didn't immediately respond to Next TV, but one of them told The Verge that Apple-paying users of Netflix's Basic plan are the ones being targeted. 

The directive doesn't seem to just about steering customers away from Apple's controversial payment methods once and for all. 

The Verge found one X/Twitter poster who said she lost access to her $9.99-a-month subscription to the ad-free Basic plan -- a tier that was ended in January.  

Under Netflix's current pricing structure, the only remaining "Basic" offering is the partially ad-supported $6.99-a-month tier. Now, if Netflix customerswant an ad-free experience, they have to sign up for the $15.49-a-month "Standard" tier. 

Our question: Is Netflix also trying to get rid of the $9.99-a-month Basic stragglers, too?

With sales of its iPhone generating around 52% of its revenue, Apple definitely feels it when economic hard times hit a key consumer market like China. 

And it’s been largely due to the hit taken by Apple’s core product that the Cupertino, California-based tech giant has taken two successive equity analyst downgrades this week. The first came from Barclays, which trimmed Apple from neutral to underweight. Then Piper Sandler’s Harsh Kumar shifted Apple’s stock down from overweight to neutral. 

Since the turn of the calendar year, Apple has seen its share price drop around 5% -- which has resulted in a $162 billion drop in market capitalization for what is still the world’s richest company, valued at over $2.8 trillion. 

Since 2018, Apple has enjoyed the greatest run in Wall Street history, expanding by a factor of nearly 5 times and surpassing $3 trillion in market capitalization. 

But Barclays analyst Tim Long suggested Apple needs a “breather” after staging a 2023 rally despite an annual decline in revenue and profit. 

Our question: With its most popular product, the iPhone, about to celebrate its 17th birthday, and no consumer product in Apple’s pipeline — including Apple's pricey VR Pro — ready to step up as a key sales driver, might we be looking at a rather protracted breather?

Already reeling with yet another defection, the remaining members of the venerable Pac-12 collegiate athletic conference were unswayed by Commissioner George Kliavkoff's presentation of a new TV deal with Apple last week.

Instead of accepting the long-awaited TV rights deal, the universities of Arizona, Arizona State and Utah chose follow Colorado out the door of the Pac-12 and to the Big 12 conference, starting officially in fall 2024. 

Washington and Oregon, meanwhile, will join the Big Ten next year, along with USC and UCLA, the two schools that set off the Pac-12's death spiral a year ago, when they declared their intention to bolt the conference. 

The remaining Pac-12 schools -- Stanford, California, Washington State and Oregon State -- are still weighing their options. 

Pac-12 football, the revenue-generating edge of the conference's athletic endeavors, will conclude with one final, undoubtedly weepy season, culminating 108 years of proud history, starting in September. 

Just like that, the winningest collegiate athletic conference of them all, with 553 accumulated titles across men's and women's sports, and the former home of iconic athletes spanning Jackie Robinson to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Aaron Rodgers, will be no more. 

The erstwhile "Pac-8," which replaced the "Athletic Association of Western Universities," which had, in turn, subsumed the league's original moniker (the "Pacific Coast Conference," founded in 1915) was home to John Wooden and his legendary "Pyramid of Success." All Wooden did was manifest an astounding 10 men's college basketball championships in 12 years, while once summoning a seemingly unsurpassable 88-game winning streak. 

USC baseball, under coach Rod Dedeaux, won 11 College World Series titles and produced Major League legends including Tom Seaver, Randy Johnson and Mark McGwire.  

USC football has won 11 national championships and produced seven Heisman Trophy winners, including last season's recipient, quarterback Caleb Williams. USC coach John McKay's victories over Bear Bryant's Alabama in the 1960s and '70s are often cited for helping desegregate sports. 

Stanford produced football's John Elway and golf's Tiger Woods. 

Nike founder Phil Knight ran track at Oregon and later outfitted Ducks distance-running legend Steve Prefontaine with his prototype running shoes.

Lisa Fernandez, now the associate head coach for the UCLA softball program she played for more than 30 years ago, was the most dominant pitcher the game has ever known, compiling a crazy-low 0.22 earned run average, a 93-7 record and 784 strikeouts.

The list of luminaries from what UCLA hoops legend turned polarizing broadcaster Bill Walton frequently refers to as "the conference of champions" can be rattled off all day long. 

It's all gone now, swimming with the fishes alongside the WAC and the Big East.  

As Next TV reported last week, the Apple deal would have been a relatively short-term arrangement, kicking off in 2024-25 as a subscription package separate from the Apple TV Plus SVOD service, along the lines of what Apple has done with Major League Soccer.

No financial terms were announced, but the deal's baselines were reported to be far under the guarantees enjoyed by rival collegiate conferences including the Big 12, which beat the Pac-12 to ESPN and Fox's pot of gold last year when it signed a national TV rights extension valued at $2.28 billion.

The Pac-12's Apple deal, ESPN reported, "would grow incrementally based on reaching certain subscription milestones."

Pac-12 athletic director's had heard a similar incentive-laden pitch a decade ago, when the conference, under then commissioner Larry Scott, launched the unwieldy Pac-12 Network regional sports channels. The audience performance never delivered on the revenue promise.

Perhaps more importantly, ESPN and Fox didn't feel the economic imperative to bid against Apple and drive up the Pac-12's TV rights price.

As eloquently detailed by one of college football's most knowledgable pundits, The Athletic's Stewart Mandel, the cause of death for the Pac-12 was the culmination of a dozen years of "hubris, apathy and astounding mismanagement."

The Pac-12's failure wasn't caused by lack of demand.

Mandel writes that it's a "lazy stereotype" to say that West Coasters "don't care" about football -- an assertion that Next TV backs up wholeheartedly. Oregon's Autzun Stadium officially seats 54,000 spectators, but the Ducks averaged 54,950 attendees last season. Defending conference champion Utah also sold out every game.

In years past, Pac-12 schools dominated programs from other conferences on the field.

Consider that from 1970 - 2011, when the Pac-12 signed a then groundbreaking 12-year, $3 billion TV rights deal, the conference had won its semi-annual head-to-head matchup against the Big Ten in the Rose Bowl 25 times vs. just 12 losses.

But throughout the 2010s, the Pac-12's football product suffered. USC, the Pac-12's only true college football "blue blood," was placed on a ruinous probation by the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 2010. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge would later rule that the NCAA's investigation of USC, led by a former University of Miami athletic director Paul Dee, was "malicious."

Fair or unfair, the harsh penalties stemming from former Trojans head coach Pete Carroll's dominant run in the aughts -- which included two national titles, seven straight Pac-12 championships and four straight Rose Bowl victories over the Big Ten -- kneecapped the conference's most successful football program. 

And certainly, the University of Southern California compounded its floundering with a series of bad administrative choices, culminating in only one Rose Bowl win and one conference title over the past 13 years.

Meanwhile, Stanford and Oregon, which surged in the early part of the last decade, "leveled off a bit," as Mandel put it, both coming close to national championships but never quite breaking through. Utah, the conference champion the past two seasons, was ultimately vanquished by Big Ten foes in the Rose Bowl each time.

UCLA, which had once rivaled USC in football success, beating Big Ten foes for three Rose Bowl titles in a four-year span in the 1980s, has underperformed for the past 20 seasons.

More than anything, however, it was former commissioner Scott's failure as a media executive that doomed the Pac-12.

As Pac-12 programs delivered middling results on the field, Scott, a former tennis pro who had headed the Women's Tennis Association, was given carte blanch, based on his initial success, by inattentive conference administrators to build the Pac 12 Networks, which ended up struggling with low ratings and subpar pay TV carriage.

Not only did the Pac-12 Networks fail to deliver nearly as much revenue to member universities vs. their rivals in the Big Ten and SEC, in recent years, the channels became an outright liability.

This season, some Pac-12 school athletic programs are even operating in the red, as they work to pay off a $50 million over-payment made to the RSNs rendered by Comcast years ago, but only recently disclosed.

Scott's reputation further suffered several years ago when the universities of Oklahoma and Texas bolted the Big 12, and the Pac-12 didn't move aggressively to poach that conference's remaining schools.

By that time, rival conferences had zoomed past the Pac-12 in terms of TV revenue.

Pac-12 ADs hoped that Scott's successor, George Kliavkoff, a former NBCUniversal, Hulu and A&E Networks exec who took over the conference's reigns in 2021, would restore order and put the conference on a more competitive TV rights footing.

But the best Kliavkoff could come up with was last week's Apple deal.

With a market cap around $3 trillion (give or take a few billion), Apple CEO Tim Cook faced Wall Street investors yesterday on the company’s quarterly earnings call, delivering respectable results that beat street estimates overall.   

Apple stock retreated slightly – down 1.5% in after hours trading – largely on news that iPhone sales had slumped 2%. iPhone sales account for 48% of the company’s total hardware sales, which were down 4.4.% overall dragged down by computer and iPad sales, which were fell 7% and 20% respectively.

But Cook touted the company’s growing services division as a particular bright spot. The services unit has tripled its subscribers in the last three years to top 1 billion paid subscriptions this quarter, up from 850 million in the same quarter last year. Financially, the division grew 8.2% to reach $21 billion year over year.

“We are happy to report that we had an all-time revenue record in services during the June quarter, driven by over 1 billion paid subscriptions,” said Cook.

“The subscriptions businesses is very healthy,” Apple CFO Luca Maestri added.

The company doesn’t break down services revenue among its various offerings, so the numbers include revenues from Apple TV Plus, Apple Music and iCloud as well as App Store, Apple Pay and Apple Card.

Teasing out Apple TV Plus’s performance is notoriously difficult, but Cook noted that, hot off 54 Emmy nominations, the streaming service had set a new quarterly record, (whatever that means).

Cook also gave a brief update on the company’s recently announced $3,500 AR/VR headset, Apple Vision Pro, revealing that the company is now shipping units to developers.

“I’m using the product daily,” he added.

ESPN is reporting that earlier this week, Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff presented the conference’s governing body with several offers for the league’s TV and streaming rights when the group’s current television contract expires after this school year. However, the report notes that a “primarily subscription-based Apple streaming deal” was clearly on top of the pile.

The deal is expected to be a relatively short-term contract with Apple kicking off in 2024-25 as a subscription package separate from an Apple TV Plus subscription, along the lines of what Apple has done with Major League Soccer.

While the financial terms were not disclosed, sources said that the renumeration would initially be relatively low compared to the league’s hopes but would grow incrementally based on reaching certain subscription milestones, “and potentially be competitive with its peers in the Big 12 and ACC down the road.”

Also Read: Pac-12 in Talks With The CW on New National TV Rights Deal

With seemingly limitless coffers, Apple has been snapping up major sports streaming rights in recent years. In March 2022, the company acquired the rights to stream Friday Night League Baseball from Major League Baseball.

In June 2022 the company inked a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal to stream Major League Soccer. The company also kicked the tires on NFL Sunday Ticket, but came away empty-handed.

In June, Apple was instrumental in luring Argentinian World Cup soccer megastar Lionel Messi away from a $430 million Saudi Arabian offer to play for Inter Miami, offering the player a percentage of revenue from new MLS Season Pass signups.

However, the Pac-12 offer may be a Hail Mary pass, as the conference is currently facing a bit of a meltdown.

Deadline is reporting that rival college athletics conference the Big Ten is evaluating expansion just as numerous reports suggest that as many as four Pac-12 colleges — Oregon, Washington, Stanford and the University of California — may be ready to jump ship. Just last week Colorado voted to return to the Big 12.

Meanwhile, the Arizona Board of Regents is scheduled to meet Thursday to discuss the fate of Arizona State and Arizona Athletics in light of Colorado’s decision and the uncertainty surrounding Pac-12.

With UCLA and USC set to desert the league in 2024, it’s unclear how much more attrition the league can withstand, or if Apple’s offer is generous enough to entice any of the teams to stay.

The big news out of the global sporting world this week has been Argentinian soccer legend Lionel Messi being lured away from a $430 million offer from Saudi Arabia's Al Hilal to play in the United States for Major League Soccer team Inter Miami. 

Messi is a seven-time Ballon d’Or winner who led Argentina to a stirring World Cup win in December. He's arguably approaching Michael Jordan in terms of global sports transcendental megastar status, and he's the biggest get ever in the 27-year history of the MLS, the 2007 signing by of David Beckham by the Los Angeles Galaxy included. 

We haven't seen a unified MLS salary figure for Messi, but considering that the league's teams are capped at $5.21 million per season for their whole roster, the 35-year-old star's compensation portfolio needed to be diversified. 

That starts with a reported 35% ownership stake in Inter Miami. But it appears to have taken a village to bring Messi to America. 

According to numerous published reports, including one in The Athletic, Apple was instrumental in luring Messi to Miami, offering the player a percentage of revenue from new MLS Season Pass signups. 

A year ago, Apple entered into a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal with the MLS to exclusively stream all of the league's games on the Apple TV app. 

Apple also revealed earlier this week that a four-part docuseries focused on Messi will soon run on SVOD service Apple TV Plus. 

Apple has never broken out subscription numbers for services including the $15-a-month MLS Season Pass, but suffice it to say that Messi's addition will likely drive signups and reduce churn. 

Meanwhile, Adidas, MLS' footwear/apparel partner, reportedly has an arrangement with Messi, as well. 

To quote an article from The Information Tuesday, ”judging a new Apple personal computing device is a fool’s errand.” 

We can’t yet know if the just-introduced Apple Vision Pro headset will transform the currently moribund realms of augmented and virtual-reality computing in the same way that the Macintosh and iPhone turned the personal computer and the smartphone into ubiquitous everyday tools that utterly changed the lives of global citizens.

Perhaps the Vision Pro, introduced Tuesday by Apple with lofty price of $3,499, will ultimately reside only on the unspectacular level of the iWatch, which leads the limited global smart-watch category in sales … but you never see kids and adults almost get creamed crossing busy streets because they were too busy staring at their iWatch. 

“Vision Pro is a new kind of computer that augments reality by seamlessly blending the real world with the digital world,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said while introducing the device at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference Monday. “It’s the first Apple device you look through and not at.”

Oh, and one more thing: Apple hasn't introduced any new daily-life-changing computer hardware since founder Steve Jobs died in 2011 and left Cook in charge. But most of the core market dynamics that have traditionally foretold success for Apple appear to be awaiting the Vision Pro.

There's a market here, but the incumbents have fallen short in terms of supplying for demand. Entertainment companies like The Walt Disney Co. — which is an early Vision Pro partner — want to deliver new types of immersive experiences to the consumers they're now engaging with directly. 

And consumers are into it. 

Consider that Meta has sold nearly 20 million $300 Quest VR headsets since it purchased Oculus, but the company formerly known as Facebook has experienced an engagement problem — consumers buy the Quest, play with it for a while, then leave it on the shelf. 

The (overly?) self-confident high school baseball player living under Next TV's roof purchased an Oculus 2 last summer specifically to run a subscription-based VR application called WIN Reality. The app promised real-life simulation for batters facing 90+ MPH fastballs. You can punch in current big-league pitchers, including fire-baller Hunter Greene, and try to hit off them with an accessory attachment that connects your bat to the Quest headset. 

But at least for our hitter, the technology fell shorter from that promise than a shallow fly ball to center. The boy ended up using his Quest for VR golf for a few months. Now it sits all day on top of the dog's crate in his room. 

For its part, Apple has historically known what needs to be done technology-wise to take an intriguing niche product, like, say, the Blackberry phone, and transform it into a must-have consumer gadget with a thriving app developer market. 

The New York Post on Tuesday suggested that the Vision Pro's $3,500 price “draws mockery.” 

But the introductory price for new Apple gadgetry has traditionally been shocking. The first-generation iPhone was priced at $599 in 2007 (equivalent to around $876.40 in today's money). The first Macintosh PC sold for $2,495 in 1984 (now equal to $7,484.80).

Even before the prices inevitably come down, we’ll start to see wealthy tastemakers influencing the market by using these Vision Pro in places like airports, and many of us will find a way to come up with 3,500 bucks. It’s the way flashy fashion-forward Apple hardware products work. 

And the app market will broaden the category with all sorts of use cases we haven't yet thought of. 

Business Insider on Tuesday noted that the Vision Pro possessed ”magic” that is still “looking for a purpose.” The possibilities for actual innovation seem far more prevalent here vs. watches and tablets, which weren't transformative enough relative to the smart phone to truly replace its functionality. 

Consider the popularity of all those how-to videos on YouTube. And Imagine looking under the hood of a 2012 Nissan Pathfinder to replace a camshaft position sensor (left bank failed on Next TV over the weekend) while having an augmented-reality stream show you what you're looking for and what steps to take. 

Or how about those “watch party” features that became popular among streaming companies during the pandemic? You could really watch with your friends — actually see them — in real time. (And when they show is over, they all go home immediately, all at once!)

The technology press is already rhapsodic, with The Verge headlining an early WWDC review with “I wore the Apple Vision Pro. It’s the best headset demo ever.’ TechCrunch, meanwhile, said its first impression is, “Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good.” 

Of course, it must be asked, is the Vision Pro really a good thing … in the collective sense?

As many of us have powerlessly witnessed, Apple has developed monopolistic app markets around gadgets like its iPhone, creating a kind of Orwellian future of its own in which a single corporate interest accumulates a vast $2.8 trillion market capitalization. 

This is related to the progressive intrusion of technology into our personal lives. 

Currently, the Vision Pro’s battery pack is only capable of two hours of sustained use before the device has to be recharged. At least for one Twitter critic, that seems to be the only thing stopping the device from turning us into mere monetization pods, directly exploitable 24/7.

Some things just go better together, and Needham analyst Laura Martin believes Apple and The Walt Disney Co. are two of those things.

“Combining Apple’s distribution footprint of 1.25 billion unique customers with Disney’s 570 million consumers reached each year would drive 15% to 25% valuation upside for Apple shareholders,“ Martin said in a research note.

Apple and Disney have long worked together. Disney was one of the first companies to put its video content on Apple’s iPod and Mickey and Minnie Mouse are featured on Apple Watches. Disney also acquired Pixar, the animation studio led by Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Martin argues that here are many other ways that a combination of Apple’s products and technology would benefit from a closer connection to Disney’s content and fan base. In fact, in her report, Martin provides a list of the Top 10 ways Disney is additive to Apple shareholders.

1.) Better Consumer Data: Most of Apple’s data is about individual behavior on a smartphone. By contrast, Disney’s data is about families. “We would argue that families are more important units to track than any one individual because many purchase decisions are made based on the influence of family members,” Martin says. “Disney’s complex network model has better predictive power about future purchasing decisions, we believe.”

2.) Bundling: Bundling can double lifetime value (LTV), by lowering churn, according to Martin’s calculations. “By combining Apple’s hardware/software bundle with Disney’s streaming bundles as well as discounting admissions to its assets in the physical world, we calculate that Apple’s churn could fall by 50%.”

3.) More Consumer Touch Points: During the pandemic, consumer use of mobile phones fell and connected TV usage rose. Disney earns money from all screens, and therefore has been hedged as consumers chose new delivery outlets.

4.) Creative Teams: There is almost nothing fungible (i.e., no substitutes) about hit storytelling teams such as Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar and Disney animation, Martin said. 

5.) Library Value: Disney’s owned animation library has been largely written down to zero over the past 20 years, but it is nearly priceless. “More recently, Disney tells us that they spend approximately $30 billion on content each year (of which $10 billion is on sports). Its return on capital for film content is second to none,“ she said.

6.) Hedge Against Tech Obsolescence: “We believe Disney’s content represents is a hedge against Apple’s potential technology obsolescence risks,“ Martin wrote. “We believe that high-quality content libraries always become more valuable over time because AAA film and TV content can be used to differentiate new technologies, content services, and/or distribution competitors over time.” 

7.) No Substitutes for Disney’s World-Building Content: Disney owns premium intellectual property, including several franchises. 

8.) Disney Character IP Rights: Disney's portfolio includes all Winnie the Pooh characters, Mickey & Minnie Mouse, Goofy, Donald Duck, the Disney Princesses, Frozen, Toy Story and Cars. These are usable in perpetuity to create the next new films, TV series, theme park attractions or Broadway shows. They are free to use forever, because Disney owns the IP.

9.) Marketing Prowess: Within mobile devices, Apple is excellent. However, its marketing pitch is mostly based on camera quality, chipsets, speeds, brightness and other technological superiority-based marketing points. And, after a consumer buys their first smartphone from Apple, 80% “renew” within five years, Martin estimates. “Although impressive, this level of renewals does not require great marketing. By contrast, Disney’s marketing team is required to create comprehensive narratives for every TV show, film, streaming show before the consumer allocates money to it.”

10.) No Legislative or Regulatory Risks: “We believe Disney has minimal regulatory or legislative risks in the near term, whereas Apple has many regulatory risks from the EU, U.S., regional, state and local governments,“ Martin said. “The more loyal super-fans and consumers a company has, the more immune they are to government intervention, we believe.”

Martin also argued Apple would be better at managing costs than Disney has been.  Disney CEO Bob Iger is currently cutting costs and has begun the layoffs of 7,000 staffers.

Martin noted that Apple’s operating expenses were 33% lower than Disney’s in 2022, even though its revenues were nearly five times larger than Disney’s.

“Based on Comcast's acquisition of NBC and Discovery's acquisition of Scripps Networks, we believe Apple could conservatively cut out 15% of total combined costs, post-merger,“ Martin said. “In addition to eliminating duplicative positions, real estate, studio space, film & TV slates, etc. We believe combining these two companies would lower the customer acquisition costs for every consumer-facing product in the combined company portfolio, post-merger.”

Martin added that Disney has tons of ad space. It sells most of it, but also uses it to promote its own products and services. Apple’s marketing costs would plummet with access to Disney’s advertising assets, she said.

Apple’s current enterprise value is $2.6 trillion, compared to Disney’s $209 billion, which means Apple can acquire Disney but Disney can’t acquire Apple. 

“Apple is currently valued at a material premium to Disney on virtually every metric,” Martin says. “If Apple buys Disney using its higher-valued share, this will be anti-dilutive to Apple shareholders on a price/earnings basis as well as on an enterprise value/revenue and enterprise value/EBITDA basis.” 

 Disney stock was up more than 1% in midday trading. Apple was up 0.5%. ■

Apple has quietly acquired a Silicon Valley startup that could help make Apple TV Plus streaming cheaper, more efficient and better. 

Privately funded with $9 million, according to CrunchBase, WaveOne makes an artificial intelligence-based video compression software that can devote limited bandwidth to vital on-screen elements like faces, while minimizing resources to backdrop elements that are less of a focus.

Even minor improvements in bandwidth efficiency can have a significant impact on how much an operation like Apple TV Plus spends to compress and deliver video, not to mention the improvement of the end-user experience. 

Apple rarely announces any of the many acquisitions it makes. But TechCrunch noticed a month-old LinkedIn posting from WaveOne business development chief Bob Stankosh.

“After almost two years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple,” Stankosh wrote. “We started our journey at WaveOne, realizing that machine learning/deep learning video technology could potentially change the world. Apple saw this potential and took the opportunity to add it to their technology portfolio.”

As TechCrunch also noted, Google is already using a machine learning algorithm originally developed to play board games to compress YouTube videos, resulting in a 4% reduction in the amount of data the company needs to stream video to consumers. Given the enormous amount of data needed to transmit 4K video over the internet, that is not a small number of 1s and 0s. 

Separately, YouTube has rolled in beta live-streaming support for the AV1 video coding format, which delivers superior 4K video in file sizes that are much smaller than with traditional standards. ■

Apple has committed to spending $1 billion a year to become a serious distributor of blockbuster movies in the global theatrical marketplace, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources. 

Apple has dabbled at the box office before. It paid $25 million to buy the indie film CODA at the Sundance Film Festival two years ago, arranged a small international theatrical release for it in Italy, Korea and Mexico, and ended up becoming the first streaming company to win the Oscar for Best Picture. 

And three years ago, Apple stepped in and agreed to finance filmmaker Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon -- at a cost of more than $200 million -- after Paramount Pictures turned away form the project. But under that arrangement, Paramount agreed to distribute the film globally. 

Now, Apple reportedly wants a more committed approach to establishing gravitas and awareness to big film projects before they reach the Apple TV Plus streaming platform. 

The blueprint isn't new. 

In November, it was reported that Amazon had also committed around $1 billion a year to produce an annual slate of 12 - 15 films, all eventually funneled through Amazon Prime Video after a theatrical window of at least a month. 

On April 5, Amazon Studios will widely release Air, director/co-star Ben Affleck's drama focused on the early days of the seminal and highly profitable partnership between NBA GOAT Michael Jordan and shoemaking GOAT Nike.

In terms of the global movie business, $1 billion isn't a massive investment, but having Silicon Valley giants like Amazon and Apple validate the global box office and the value of windowing content is certainly impactful, given the state of worldwide theatrical distribution post-COVID. 

The Bloomberg leak was actually the second significant Apple TV Plus announcement this week, following Apple's disclosure on Wednesday that Friday Night Baseball will now be put behind the Apple TV Plus paywall. 

Now just shy of 41 months after launch, Apple has remained cagey as to how many subscribers and how much usage its subscription streaming platform is generating. 

In fact, this might be one of the more carefully guarded unknowns in all of the video business, but we would be careful to avoid insinuations that Apple TV Plus is "struggling." 

Apple disclosed in early February that it now has 935 million paid subscriptions across services including not just Apple TV Plus, but Apple Arcade, iCloud, Apple Music, Apple News Plus, Apple Fitness Plus, Apple One and Apple Pay. Collectively these services generated $20.8 billion in the most recently accounted for quarter, Apple's first of the 2023 fiscal year. 

DirecTV for Business has entered a deal with Apple to provide MLS Season Pass to its network of more than 300,000 restaurants, bars, hotel lounges, retail shops and other venues during the 2023 MLS season on their existing satellite equipment.

Starting Feb. 25, when the 2023 MLS season begins, DirecTV for Business establishments will be able to show every regular season MLS match, as well as the MLS Cup Playoffs. In between, events such as the MLS All-Star Game will also be included. (You can see a schedule of MLS Season Pass events here.)

“We welcome the addition of MLS Season Pass to an already market-leading lineup of sports properties that our commercial customers can continue to receive seamlessly through their existing satellite equipment and offer to their patrons," said Rob Thun, DirecTV chief content officer, in a statement. 

Apple announced back in November that it agreed to pay Major League Soccer $2.5 billion over the next 10 years to form the MLS Season Pass streaming package, an add-on within the Apple TV app that runs consumers $14.99 a month.

DirecTV didn't detail the pricing model for its business customers. 

The sub-licensing deal for the streaming games package follows a similar agreement DirecTV for Business entered into back in August for NFL "Thursday Night Football" -- a property that Amazon is now paying $1 billion a season to license. 

DirecTV recently demurred on extending its decades-long partnership with the NFL for the "NFL Sunday Ticket" out-of-market games package which, up until December when the NFL's regular season ended, the pay TV company had been paying $1.5 billion a season to carry. 

With Google/Alphabet and its YouTube unit ending up with "Sunday Ticket," there has been speculation that DirecTV might enter a sub-licensing agreement with Alphabet to show the package in bars and restaurants. 

DirecTV wouldn't comment about this, but an individual familiar with the company's dealings said that it's talking to "everyone about major sports properties that have gone to streaming." 

Peter Stern, who oversees Apple's paid subscription services including Apple TV Plus, will depart the company at the end of January.

According to Business Insider, Stern — who operates under the title of VP of services — has told colleagues he wants to spend more time on the East Coast.

Stern was previously a New York-based chief product, people and strategy officer for the erstwhile Time Warner Cable, joining Apple in June 2016 as the cable company was being merged with Charter Communications.

Apple discloses few metrics about its subscription services business, but it does indicate they're currently growing, garnering 5% revenue growth to $19.9 billion for the fiscal quarter ending in September. However, that represented a significant deceleration from the same period between 2021 - 2022, during which revenue grew by 26%.

Stern is credited with getting Apple TV Plus into the sports rights business, leading negotiations with Major League Baseball for Friday Night Baseball, among other endeavors. In addition to Apple TV Plus, Stern helped build Apple subscription products including Arcade, Books, and Apple One, News Plus, Fitness Plus and iCloud Plus.

Stern had also been seen by many to be the heir apparent to Apple services business czar Eddie Cue.

Upon his departure, his oversight will be split into three separate divisions, Business Insider said, with Apple Music chief Oliver Schusser heading one of those units. ■

Eight months after it reported that Apple had already made a deal to license "NFL Sunday Ticket" and was merely figuring out announcement timing, Puck News said that the tech giant has backed away from the pricey out-of-market games package.

And in the suddenly fast-moving negotiations, The New York Times reported Tuesday that Google has emerged as the latest favorite, with the tech giant said to be willing to pay as much as $2.5 billion to acquire the rights. Google would use the premium out-of-market NFL games package to augment its YouTube TV virtual pay TV service, which has over 5 million subscribers. 

If the well-substantiated $2.5 billion figure holds up, that will be about $1 billion more a season than incumbent "Sunday Ticket" carrier DirecTV is paying right now. 

According to Puck, price wasn't a consideration for Apple and its $3 trillion market capitalization. Rather, the company merely took a sober look at what the rights package will do for its business. 

Apple was reportedly concerned about "NFL Sunday Ticket's" local blackout restrictions and its total lack of international reach. Apple also wants to somehow integrate the games package -- which DirecTV sells for about $300 per season -- into its $6.99-a-month Apple TV Plus subscription, Puck said. 

With Disney and newly restored CEO Bob Iger demurring on "NFL Sunday Ticket" for ESPN, as well, that left Amazon and Google as the sole remaining bidders for the package, which culminates a three-decade relationship with DirecTV upon the conclusion of the current NFL regular season on January 8. 

Amazon already pays the NFL more than $100 million per season for rights to the "Thursday Night Football" franchise. 

The Cadillac of connected TV gadgets just got an upgrade ... and a decidedly more affordable suggested retail price.

Released amid a flurry of new Apple hardware, the third generation of the Apple TV 4K now comes with an entry-level $129 price tag, which is 50 bucks cheaper than the second generation Apple TV 4K.

For the lesser money, purchasers get a device that's 50% faster than the 2G model, but uses 30% less power, according to Apple, all thanks to a A15 Bionic CPU.

Apple has ditched its fussy Lightning charging interface in favor of the far more accessible USB-C. The gadget supports HDR10+, Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital 7.1 and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound for immersive audio, comes with a Siri voice-enabled remote, and includes a spacious 64 gigabytes of storage -- which is about four times as much as you'll find in most competitor's grande-sized boxes.

The premium version, which retails for $149, adds Ethernet connectivity to Wi-Fi support, and it includes a cavernous 128 GB of storage. ■

The National Football League said that Apple has signed a long-term deal to be the sponsor of the Super Bowl halftime show, replacing Pepsi, which was part of the big game for 10 years.

The musical extravaganza will promote Apple Music.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Published reports estimated the price tag at $50 million annually.

The halftime show, which has featured performers ranging from Prince to U2 to Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, is typically the most-watched music performance of the year, occasionally sparking controversy a la Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake.

Last year’s acclaimed show featured classic rappers Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar and 50 Cent. More than 120 million viewers tuned in and the show won three Creative Emmy Awards.

“We are proud to welcome Apple Music to the NFL family as our new partner for the iconic Super Bowl Halftime Show,” Nana-Yaw Asamoah, senior VP of partner strategy for the NFL said. “We couldn't think of a more appropriate partner for the world's most-watched musical performance than Apple Music, a service that entertains, inspires, and motivates millions of people around the world through the intersection of music and technology.”

Apple has been moving into the TV sports business with its Friday Night Baseball doubleheaders. It is also a contender for the NFL’s Sunday Ticket out-of-market package.

“Music and sports hold a special place in our hearts, so we’re very excited Apple Music will be part of music and football's biggest stage,“ Oliver Schusser, Apple's VP of Apple Music and Beats, said. “We’re looking forward to even more epic performances next year and beyond with the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show.” ■

Google has reportedly entered the bidding for NFL Sunday Ticket, which already has a competitive field of aspirants including Apple, Amazon and Disney/ESPN.

According to the New York Times, Google is bidding on behalf of its YouTube unit for the NFL's popular out-of-market games package, which breaks free from its ancient ties with DirecTV after this coming season. 

It's believed that the winning bidder will pay more than $2.5 billion a year to acquire the rights to the package, which delivers every regular season NFL game to viewers not being played in their town. 

DirecTV, which has controlled NFL Sunday Ticket rights since the mid-1990s, is said to be losing as much as $500 million per year on the package, which is priced at just under $300 per season. 

However, NFL Sunday Ticket has held steady for DirecTV at around 2 million subscribers, making it a key anchor at a time when the pay TV service has taken on heavy customers losses due to cord cutting. 

For months, Apple has reportedly had the inside track, with one pundit declaring the biggest of all tech giants the imminent winner of the bid over the spring. 

In its Sunday report, the New York Times confirms Apple's desire to acquire the asset, noting that CEO Tim Cook has even taken meetings with league owners including the Dallas Cowboys' Jerry Jones and the Kraft family, who control the New England Patriots.

The Times also spoke to former Disney CEO Bob Iger, who lamented the notion of tech giants, who have far deeper pockets to license live sports merely for the "platform engagement" they provide, and not beholden to the same gravity of ratings points and advertisers that traditional media companies are. 

“It’s hard when you’re competing with entities that aren’t playing by the same financial rules,” Iger said. 

Meanwhile, the NFL continues to covet having the biggest remaining draw in live TV. 

“A number of companies are in strong position to potentially land Sunday Ticket, but we still have a ways to go in this process,” said Brian Rolapp, the NFL’s chief media and business officer, in a statement. ■

The word is that Apple, Amazon and The Walt Disney Co., possessors of three of the deepest pockets in the media business, are the sole remaining bidders for the National Football League’s out-of-market programming package, NFL Sunday Ticket.  While a lot of the talk around the deal is the price tag — at $2.5 billion to $3 billion annually, it is about twice what current rightsholder DirecTV paid for the package in 2014 — what could be most valuable to the streaming bidders is the impact Sunday Ticket could have on subscriber growth. 

There is no doubt that each of the three players have the financial strength to handle a deal. Apple has a $2.29 trillion market cap, Amazon’s is $1.15 trillion and Disney is, well, Disney. And even though all three could use access to the out-of-market package to their respective advantage, it seems at least for now that the one that would benefit most would be Apple.

In an interview, LHB Media & Entertainment president and CEO Lee Berke said that while Sunday Ticket helped DirecTV establish its linear satellite TV business nearly 30 years ago, the package is most likely to benefit streamers today.

“Now, I think it is best offered up as a streaming product because you want increased bandwidth, you want to come up with betting channels, you want to come up with all sorts of variations,” Berke said, adding that in addition to games, there are opportunities like the Manningcast [Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli]  and other peripheral programming that could be tied to the package. Also part of the mix are equity stakes in NFL Media — which houses NFL Network and RedZone — and possibly mobile rights, which could allow a streamer the chance to price and package services more creatively. 

“There have been all sorts of opportunities that haven’t been exploited in part because there is a limited amount of bandwidth on satellite,” Berke added. “I think that’s why you’re looking at a substantial streaming presence for Sunday Ticket going forward that allows you to exploit those games in more and different ways than you have in the past.”   

It’s Apple’s Deal to Lose 

While all three bidders have a streaming presence, Berke believes that Sunday Ticket makes the most sense for Apple TV Plus.

“I think that the overall heritage and philosophy of the NFL from a media standpoint is not to put all of your eggs in one basket,” Berke said. “They like to have as many different media companies as possible involved, because you’re not beholden to any one, you get them to compete, they try different approaches, they create, they’re inventive. Since you have Amazon making a major investment in Thursday Night Football, it just seems like Apple, now developing its sports resources with Major League Baseball and MLS, it seems like the next step would be establishing an NFL relationship as well.”

Amazon is paying an estimated $1 billion per year for Thursday Night Football rights. 

While The NFL would likely gain from a closer relationship with the hardware juggernaut, Apple too could use the relationship to create its own opportunities.

“I think there’s upside because everybody is looking at it like there is this finite number of games. No there’s not,” Berke said. “The NFL on its own created RedZone out of this. They created a Fantasy [Football] channel out of it. Now you bring in somebody else with a huge amount of expertise — an Apple, Amazon or Disney. It seems like you’ll get  some other very creative people, some very tech-savvy people that can come up with all sorts of variations.”

Berke added that the attractiveness of Sunday Ticket wouldn’t stop at just bringing more subscribers into the streaming video fold. 

“It’s not just the profitability of the media,” Berke said. “For Apple, does it help them sell hardware? Does it help them sell watches? Does it offer unique functions on an iPad when you get Sunday Ticket? Those are really, really valuable things.” 

Apple also seems more than willing to dive deeply into sports rights after years of sitting on the sidelines. Earlier this month, the company restarted talks for rights to Big Ten Conference college football, which recently expanded to 16 teams by adding Pac-12 powerhouses USC and UCLA.

“[Apple’s] content appetite is seemingly insatiable between Apple TV Plus originals, MLB, MLS and maybe Sunday Ticket OTT,” Wells Fargo media analyst Steven Cahall wrote in a recent research note.

Streaming Growth 

Apple, despite its dominance in the tech sector, is lagging significantly behind its peers in the streaming video business. Launched on November 1, 2019, Apple TV Plus has about 25 million subscribers paying $4.99 per month for its video streaming service. In contrast, Disney Plus — launched 11 days later on November 12, 2019 — has 137 million global customers. Amazon Prime Video has around 200 million subscribers, but most of those are there for the free shipping from Amazon Prime.  

But streamers have seen the explosive subscriber growth of the past few years begin to slow in recent quarters, as inflation, the overall economy and subscriber fatigue have caused consumers to cut back. While most point to Netflix’s 200,000-subscriber loss in Q1 as a sign that streaming was losing its luster, other SVOD companies have seen growth slow. Disney Plus added 2 million subscribers in fiscal Q4 — half of what analysts expected — but seemed to rebound in later quarters, with fiscal Q1 streaming subscriber additions rising by 11.2 million and in fiscal Q2 additions up by 9.2 million. But there are fears that consumers are backing away from some streaming services because of rising monthly charges, prompting many to offer ad-supported versions of their service at reduced fees. 

Tick, Tick, Tick 

There are still a lot of ways this could play out. In 2021, Amazon was said to be the front-runner for Sunday Ticket, with that momentum shifting to Apple in April 2022. More recently, speculation is that DirecTV could still be in the mix, opting to share rights with a streamer or reaching a deal to retain lucrative commercial rights (sports bars and restaurants) for the package. The NFL also could decide to keep Sunday Ticket in-house, possibly making it available through its own direct-to-consumer offering — NFL Plus — which is expected to launch in July. 

And there is still a lot of time to hammer out an agreement. DirecTV’s exclusivity doesn’t expire until after the 2022-23 season, giving several months for further negotiations. 

On the other hand, it is getting close to the time that the NFL has announced previous renewals — DirecTV signed an eight-year extension for Sunday Ticket in October 2014, a month after the final season under its old deal began. Whether this will take longer is anyone’s guess. 

Do You Wanna Pay for Some Football?

While Sunday Ticket has been around for nearly 30 years, its value depends on who owns the rights. In DirecTV’s early days, it was a big catalyst for subscribers to its satellite TV service — you still have to subscribe to DirecTV linear to get access to Sunday Ticket — and paid off in spades in subscriber growth. While there were other factors such as pricing, quality of service, clearer pictures, a national footprint and access to then-rare HDTV channels, Sunday Ticket helped push DirecTV into the No. 1 spot among TV distributors. A year after DirecTV launched Sunday Ticket in 1994, its subscriber base nearly quadrupled from 332,000 in 1994 to 1.2 million in 1995. By 2014 the satellite service had more than 20 million customers. 

Will Sunday Ticket have the same impact on its new owners? Probably not. It’s not even having the same impact on DirecTV, which has shed a huge number of subscribers over the years — it had 14.6 million as of Q2 — all while it continued to offer Sunday Ticket. DirecTV does not reveal subscriber numbers for Sunday Ticket, but estimates put it at around 2 million customers. Other reports estimate that DirecTV is losing about $500 million per year on Sunday Ticket.  

At Kagan, the media research unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence, research director Deana Myers believes the subscriber tally for Sunday Ticket is “well below” 2 million, and while she sees the package having some benefit to streamers, don’t count on it being too dramatic. 

“I think getting Sunday Ticket would likely put Apple TV Plus on the map, but not to the degree that it did for DirecTV,” Myers wrote in an email message. “Sunday Ticket’s value for DirecTV was that it drew a lot of really high-end subscribers who would sign up for the top packages. In the old, successful pay TV world that worked, but it loses a lot of money today for them. Apple could gain subs, they have the cash for such a deal, they have been buying a lot of sports rights and it could help them with their main goal of selling more devices.” 

But Berke believes the benefit of Sunday Ticket lies in more than just a beefier subscriber base.   

“If Apple is potentially a co-owner of NFL Media and they come up with five different ways to take that package and off it up in different fashions and if it helps them create a whole new version of iPhones that are NFL-specific, it’s more than carried its weight,” Berke said.

And Then There Were Three

Apple has re-established itself as the front-runner, according to some reports, but what appears to be holding up the deal are the equity stake in NFL Media and the ultimate price tag. While the NFL reportedly wants as much as $3 billion for the rights, pundits believe the deal will come in lower, perhaps in the $2 billion range.    

That’s still above the $1.5 billion annually DirecTV is paying, but may point to problems with the deal’s structure. According to CNBC,  sources familiar with the deal say that the NFL is requiring that whoever buys Sunday Ticket price it at or above its $300 to $400 yearly market value, mainly because of deals the NFL has with broadcasters CBS and Fox. So there will be no deep discounting of the service, something that DirecTV has done in the past to keep existing sub numbers up and attract new customers. Apple and Amazon also are said to be very interested in international streaming rights, something that Myers believes the NFL would like to sell separately. 

“I think the limitations that the NFL is trying to put on a deal will mean the deal comes in pretty far below what they are asking,” Myers said.

In the end, any deal will come down to who needs Sunday Ticket the most. And if scale still matters in the streaming business, that would seem to be Apple. ■

The plan to bring two West Coast college football powerhouses into the Big Ten Conference has brought Apple back to the TV-rights bargaining table, according to reports.

Expanding the Midwest-rooted Big Ten from its current 14 schools to 16 would create a national footprint stretching from Rutgers in New Jersey and Maryland to California, making its TV rights and its Big Ten Network (BTN) more valuable.

This has been noticed by Apple, which after dropping out of the bidding for a package of Big Ten football games, has reengaged, according to Sports Business Journal.

Apple's Apple TV Plus streaming platform has developed an appetite for sports. It already has a Friday-night doubleheader package of Major League Baseball games and struck a deal with Major League Soccer. It is also reportedly among the leading contenders for the NFL Sunday Ticket package of out-of-market games.

The vote by Big Ten school presidents to add UCLA and USC lead to the conference delaying the deadline for completing its media-rights negotiations. Those rights are now expected to top $1 billion, a record for college football.

Fox Sports, which helped launch BTN, reportedly already has a deal to carry half of the Big Ten’s games. A second package appeared to be going to CBS, which is losing its top-rated Sunday SEC college football franchise to ESPN in 2004.

Amazon Prime Video, ESPN and NBC were reportedly competing for a third package before Apple’s re-entry into the bidding.

College football is rapidly changing into a two-conference sport, with the Big Ten competing with the SEC, which has added Texas and Oklahoma.  

Notre Dame, which has long been independent with a contract with NBC paying the bills, may have to become part of one of the major conferences to maintain its status as a top-tier program. ■

Amazon, Apple and The Walt Disney Co. are the final bidders for the NFL Sunday Ticket package, according to reports.

The league is seeking $2.5 billion to $3 billion for the package of out-of-market pro football games, according to Front Office Sports.

It is unclear whether any of the bidders are willing to pay that amount, which has led to a delay in the NFL awarding the package. Also complicating the issue is the league is looking to sell a stake in NFL Media, which includes NFL Network, NFL RedZone and NFL.com.

Two of the bidders, Disney, which has ESPN’s Monday Night Football, and Amazon, which this year starts a 10-year run as the exclusive national home of Thursday Night Football, are already paying $1 billion or more to the NFL.

Also: Apple May Bundle NFL Plus with NFL Sunday Ticket

DirecTV has had the rights to Sunday Ticket and paid $1.5 billion annually, drawing about 2 million subscribers each year. DirecTV required consumers to subscribe to DirecTV’s pay TV service in order to also subscribe to Sunday Ticket. That requirement began to break down in recent years, with some viewers in some ZIP codes able to order a streaming version of the package. In the new deal, no other subscription will be required to get Sunday Ticket, according to CNBC.

DirecTV might try to continue to maintain its Sunday Ticket subs as a subcontractor to whatever company wins the rights. It is not clear whether any of the current bidders for the package would be interested in that arrangement, CNBC said.

Also in the air is the commercial Sunday Ticket product, which DirecTV has sold to bars and restaurants.

Should the NFL not get what it considers a satisfactory bid, the league could also opt to put the out-of-market game on its own streaming service, called NFL Plus, which is expected to launch later this year. ■

Jumping further into the TV sports market, Apple said it reached a 10-year deal to stream Major League Soccer matches.

All MLS matches will be available on a new subscription service that will be exclusively available via the Apple TV app. 

Subscribers will be able to watch MLS games — plus some MLS Next matches —without local broadcast blackouts or subscribing to a pay TV bundle. Sports are seen as a major reason why people continue to subscribe to cable and satellite amid a wave of cord-cutting.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but published reports pegged its value at $2.5 billion.

“For the first time in the history of sports, fans will be able to access everything from a major professional sports league in one place,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior VP of services. “It’s a dream come true for MLS fans, soccer fans, and anyone who loves sports. No fragmentation, no frustration — just the flexibility to sign up for one convenient service that gives you everything MLS, anywhere and anytime you want to watch. We can’t wait to make it easy for even more people to fall in love with MLS and root for their favorite club.”

The live and on-demand MLS content on the Apple TV app will be available across devices 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.

“Apple is the perfect partner to further accelerate the growth of MLS and deepen the connection between our clubs and their fans,” said Don Garber, MLS’s commissioner. “Given Apple’s ability to create a best-in-class user experience and to reach fans everywhere, it’ll be incredibly easy to enjoy MLS matches anywhere, whether you’re a super fan or casual viewer.”

Apple has dived into sports with a Friday night Major League Baseball doubleheader package on Apple TV Plus. 

The company is also reportedly in the bidding for the National Football League’s NFL Sunday Ticket out-of-market service.  ■

Mark Bozon, the top gaming creative for Apple Arcade is moving to Disney, we're he'll serve as VP of next generation storytelling creative experiences under Mike White, the man charged in February to lead the studio's "metaverse" strategy. 

Indeed, White, the former Yahoo and Apollo Group executive who reports himself to Disney Media and Entertainment Chairman Kareem Daniel and Disney Parks, Experiences and Products Chairman Josh D'Amario, prefers the term "next generation storytelling."

The terms, Disney says is a "banner and defined a strategy focused on creating new canvases for storytelling and audience engagement in a connected world of digital, physical and virtual experiences. 

And Bozon marks a key creative broad onboard to help execute that strategy. 

According to Disney, Bozon and his team "will be instrumental in defining and designing new storytelling experiences across various physical and digital canvases -- partnering closely with Disney’s incredible creative, technology, design and strategy teams to accelerate development of key priorities in the broader strategy.

 Additionally, Bozon's group "will innovate and incubate bold ideas, serve as a clearing house for creative NGS concepts, and partner with key stakeholders to understand existing NGS related creative and technology goals across gaming, film, TV, toys, parks and more."

Bozon had worked at Apple since 2010.

Apple has long practiced a level of company secrecy, especially around product announcements, that’s uniquely stringent even in corporate tech circles. Which makes all the more intriguing the potential announcements at next Monday’s opening session of the company’s World Wide Developers Conference, often a bully platform for announcing its paradigm-shifting products to the people building software for them.

No, we probably won’t see the company’s long-in-development augmented-reality/virtual-reality headset or the related realityOS operating system for it, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has a long history of accurately reading Apple tea leaves. Maybe there’ll be a new version of the MacBook Air laptop with a next-generation M2 processor.

Also read: Apple May Bundle NFL Plus with NFL Sunday Ticket

But the truly intriguing possibility has more to do with what Apple may announce, at WWDC or soon thereafter, with its streaming service, Apple TV Plus, and the NFL. 

Apple remains, by most recent reporting, the most likely future home for the NFL Sunday Ticket package of out-of-market games that limping satcaster DirecTV is giving up after this season, though Amazon is reportedly still very much in the hunt.

At the same time, the NFL is building its own streaming service, NFL Plus, which Sports Business Journal reported recently is expected to launch in July. 

As with the Sunday Ticket package, Apple and Amazon are the leading contenders to acquire rights to the service, which would feature live games on mobile phones and tablets, for $5 a month, plus whatever shoulder content such as radio, podcasts and team-created content are added in. 

Unlike Sunday Ticket, NFL Plus would only show the games someone could see in their home market. Previously, the material was available in a now-elapsed package with Yahoo and major wireless carriers.  

Perhaps more importantly, the league is considering selling a stake in NFL Media, where, again, Amazon and Apple are prime contenders. Both have the fat wallets and vast ambitions to do the deal, but I’m thinking the NFL may prefer to do a deal with Apple more than Amazon, if other deal points are relatively equal. 

Should Amazon pick up those two bits of NFL business, it would be easily the league’s most important partner. Amazon already is spending $1 billion annually for the next 11 years on Thursday night games. 

But all of that together would give Amazon outsized say over the league’s media future, while shutting out another rich and eager new partner just as all of the NFL’s older broadcast and cable distributors have seen audiences erode amid cord-cutting. 

Too much concentration is bad business, something the league is seldom accused of being about. Historically, the NFL has preferred to spread its media relationships around, much like the Defense Department with military contracts in every Congressional district, to ensure it always has competitive bids and political support for its valuable content, the most-watched programming on television. 

And Apple could definitely bring a lot to this team. 

It starts with an installed base of 1.8 billion devices, including hundreds of millions of iPhones, which make Apple the world’s most lucrative handset and tablet maker. 

The company is learning the ins and outs of streaming live sports, and targeted video advertising, with its Friday Night Baseball deal. Apple has declined so far to specify how many subscribers it has for Apple TV Plus, the service is on a roll in terms of quality programming, with lots more to come. 

Apple is expected to bump up content spending next year to more than $12 billion, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. That’s close to double the current level of $6 billion to $7 billion, and starts to create headaches for competitors trying to keep up in a tighter market. 

The NFL games (and tens of millions of viewers) would fit nicely next to the upcoming Martin Scorsese project, Killers of the Flower Moon, and whatever blockbuster content arrives by way of a deal with David Ellison’s Skydance Media (Top Gun: Maverick, multiple Mission: Impossible, Terminator,  and Jack Reacher entries). 

The NFL has been moving aggressively into new platforms for a while. It announced a developer contest last year with game platform Skillz to create NFL-branded football-connected mobile apps. Several finalists announced this March are headed to a bakeoff with a potential August launch ahead of the season. Winners will get a coveted league endorsement, branding and marketing support. 

And though Apple CEO Tim Cook has been even more secretive than usual when it comes to those Apple TV Plus subscriber counts (or indeed, the service’s basic strategy), an NFL partnership might arrive at a particularly propitious time for Apple. 

Over the past eight months, TV Plus projects have won a Best Comedy Emmy for Ted Lasso and a Best Picture Oscar for Coda. 

As this year’s Emmy FYC season kicks into high gear, newer shows Pachinko, from Korean-born auteur Kogonada, and Severance, produced and directed by Ben Stiller among others, are almost certainly in the mix. Schlub spy series Slow Horses, with Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, is also getting some critical love. 

The recent awards attention is an impressive validation of Apple TV Plus’ go-slow originals-only approach, which early on left its offerings woefully meager. At one point last year, I wrote that the bare cupboard made TV Plus look more like more like a corporate hobby than a truly competitive streaming service. 

Indeed, Apple seemed to agree. Even with TV Plus’ dirt-cheap price ($5.99 a month, or part of Apple’s various services bundles), Apple gave away subscriptions to just about anybody who would take one during TV Plus’ first 20 months or so of existence. 

Also read: Apple Makes History with Friday Night Baseball Debut

Now, it looks ready to spend as needed, part of Cook’s broader efforts to drive company growth through an ever beefier Services division, which generated $68 billion in fiscal year 2021. That was up a whopping 27 percent in a year. It’s also three times the market capitalizations of Paramount Global, which owns longtime NFL broadcaster CBS.  

The NFL, meanwhile, remains the biggest show on American television, however you define “TV.” How else to explain Fox’s $375 million announcer contract (the network has pushed back on the number, but whatever it is, it’s a lot) for still-not-retired quarterback Tom Brady and CBS’ $180 million/10-year deal with the already-retired Tony Romo? Just talking about the game is big business, because the game is massive business. 

Apple would need to figure out issues such as its own announcing teams, and likely further build out its advertising infrastructure. But it would have the Friday Night Baseball learnings, a year to get ready for Sunday Ticket, and the stake in NFL Media for master classes. If that all came together Apple would have bought into one of the world’s most successful TV production companies, which masquerades as a sports league. That would be a formidable new team indeed in the streaming wars. ■

Apple appears to have the inside track to bundling the just-reported new mobile streaming service from the NFL with the league's soon-to-be-available NFL Sunday Ticket out-of-market games package, according to Apple Insider and several other media sources covering the tech giant closely.

Last month, it was reported that Apple was close -- or perhaps had even completed -- a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar deal to assume NFL Sunday Ticket rights once legacy stakeholder DirecTV's deal to carry the package ends after this upcoming pro football season.

Separately, Apple is said to be in negotiations with the league to purchase an equity stake in NFL Media, the division that will reportedly launch the new mobile streaming service, dubbed "NFL Plus," in July.

Also: NFL Set To Launch $5 Monthly Streaming Services in July: Report

Both NFL Plus and NFL Sunday Ticket would live within the confines of subscription streaming service Apple TV Plus, the enthusiasts pubs report. 

On Wednesday, Sports Business Journal reported that the NFL was moving forward with a plan to launch a $5-a-month streaming service that would give subscribers smart phone and tablet access to NFL games. The service would replace legacy mobile offerings offered in previous seasons through Yahoo, Verizon and other third parties. ■

Micro-chips remain scarce and pricey worldwide, and the cost of producing streaming gadgets has never been higher. But for connected TV device makers, it makes no sense to pass the hurt onto the consumer -- they still want to get as many new users on their platforms as possible. 

For its part, Roku, which saw revenue from gadget sales decline 19% in the first quarter, is trying to hold the line on consumer pricing. And that results in some good deals on the latest streaming hardware. 

For starters, Roku is now bundling its premium "Roku Ultra" player with its Voice Rechargeable Voice Remote Pro in a bundle priced at $99.99. Equipped with a quad-core processor, 4GB of SSD storage (spacious by Roku standards), Dolby Vision, 4K, HDR10+ and Dolby Atmos support, as well as the most primo Wi-Fi reception tech, the Ultra had been packaged with the Roku Voice Remote and available for a sale price of $89.99.

Also read: For Fast-Aging Streaming Devices, 8GB Is Not Enough

Last year, Roku introduced a rechargeable version of its voice remote, which includes other nifty features like "lost remote finder" and a "private listening" headphone port, for $30. 

With its latest bundle,  which hits retail shelves May 15, Roku is including those remote control innovations, but only upping the price by $10. You'd spend 10 bucks on AAA batteries over the next few months, so it's not a bad price point. 

Certainly, a bulk of retail attention has been focused on the under-$30 streaming stick/dongle race, but there are consumers who appreciate the benefit of having a powerful computer device that's less likely to buffer, and run out of storage and random access memory. 

With that in mind, you can now pick up the 32GB version of the latest Apple TV 4K device on Amazon for $149.99, which is $30 off the regular MSRP. The 64GB version, which will let you store as many SVOD and AVOD apps as you can find on the internet, is discounted on Amazon by $10 to $189.99. 

Introduced last year, the Apple TV 4K includes the fastest processor you can find in a streaming gadget, Apples A12 Bionic chip, as well as four times as the usual amount of SSD storage you find in most sticks, pucks and smart TVs. 

Is Apple about to what it said it never would, and give up on its rather exclusive charging port standard for one of the most popular streaming devices of all, the iPhone?

According to influential tech analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple will abandon its decade-long fixation on the Lightning port in favor of the more popularly used USB-C standard starting with its 2023 iPhones. 

Via an unspecified survey, Kuo said USB-C “could improve iPhone’s transfer and charging speed in hardware designs, but the final spec details still depend on iOS support.”

Apple has long favored the somewhat exclusive Lightning standard because it allows more streamlined product design and offers better waterproofing capabilities. 

But Apple has faced pressure from entities like the European Union, which would like to see iPhones adopt the same charging cable standard the vast majority of the global smartphone market uses. This would cut down on electronic waste, the EU contends.

For its part, Apple has said that suddenly switching all its phones to USB-C would generate more e-waste, not less. And it has been widely assumed that Apple will abandon Lightning when it takes its iPhones portless, relying on wireless charging and data transfer. 

But as The Verge, which first reported on Kuo's tweet, noted, Apple has come around a bit lately, integrating USB-C in its most recent iPads. 

Only 23 percent of DirecTV customers recently polled by S&P Kagan acknowledge paying for the satellite TV company's exclusively licensed NFL Sunday Ticket add-on package. 

The survey data, which was first published by paywalled news site Axios Tuesday, offers insight as to why DirecTV, which has licensed the Sunday Ticket out-of-market games package from the NFL since 1994 and currently pays $1 billion a season for it, will not seek to renew the agreement when it expires after this upcoming pro football season. 

It was reported late last month that Apple is close to licensing NFL Sunday Ticket, paying as much as $2.5 billion a year. 

According to the S&P Kagan data, 16% of DirecTV customers said they also subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket, but get it free through promotional discounting. Seven percent said they were unsure if they had the add-on programming bundle. 

DirecTV was spun off from AT&T last year and had a reported 14.6 million remaining subscribers across its satellite- and IP-based services at the end of 2021. NFL Sunday Ticket pricing ranges from $293.96 to $395.99 for the "Max" plan, with customers able to sign up as the NFL regular season progresses at prorated cost.

Doing the basic math, if 23% of AT&T's base (around 3.35 million customers) pay $300, DirecTV is just about breaking even each season on its Sunday Ticket licensing. ■

Republican FCC Commissioner and Big Tech critic Brendan Carr says Apple is blocking Voice of America's mobile app from its App Store in China and he wants some answers, actually a single answer, from Apple CEO Tim Cook by the end of the month.

Following Cook's speech last week to an IAPP Global Privacy Summit April 12 in Washington, one in which he spoke eloquently, according to Carr, about "Apple’s commitment to operating its App Store in a manner that promotes privacy and human rights," Carr said the CEO's words did not match "the reality" of the company's actions in China.

Also: FCC's Carr Slams Twitter

Carr focused on what he said was Apple's decision to remove the VOA app to "appease" the Chinese Communist Party, a move he said "cannot be squared with your representation in Washington that Apple will 'battle against an array of dangerous actors' nor your claim that Apple will 'protect people’s fundamental rights' from abusive surveillance."

Carr's office had not returned a request at press time for a comment on where he had learned of Apple's blocking of the VOA App.

VOA is the U.S. Agency for Global Media-funded operation providing independent news to places that lack access to it.

Also: Carr Says Big Tech Should Pay Into USF

Carr said that the relatively new mobile app allows smart phone users to access the kind of unfiltered news the broadcast operation has been providing for decades, calling it an "important tool" for information on authoritarian regimes, "unless, of course, you are an iPhone user in China."

He ripped the company for its overall relationship with China, including extensive manufacturing operations there, but said he was just looking for the answer to one question by April 29: "Will Apple allow access to the Voice of America mobile app through its App Store in China, consistent with the fundamental human rights that you articulated in your speech?" ■

Apple has already won the bidding to pay more than $2 billion a year for the "NFL Sunday Ticket" games bundle and will assume control of the out-of-market regular season games package when it breaks free from the only television distribution partner it has ever had, DirecTV, starting in the 2023 season.

Puck News reporter Matthew Belloni, citing unnamed sourcing, said a deal between Apple and the NFL has already been made, but Apple is holding off on making an announcement. (Editor's note: The widely consumed NFL Draft is set to begin on April 28.) 

It wouldn't be all that surprising for Apple to win the prized asset. In February, Sports Business News' John Ourand reported that the bidding would exceed $2 billion annually and was largely down to Apple and Amazon. 

Also read: Maybe That Apple TV Plus Idea Isn’t So Crazy After All

Apple hasn't commented publicly on this matter. 

NFL Sunday Ticket is an a la carte pay TV product that has been exclusively available on DirecTV since its launch in 1994. Subscribers pay from $290 - $400 a season to have Sunday access to every live NFL regular season game not being played in their local market. 

DirecTV has expressed an interest in keeping the venue rights to broadcast NFL Sunday Ticket in places like bars and restaurants. 

Apple, which has a market capitalization of $2.7 trillion, has been aggressive with sports rights, paying $55 million a year, and another $30 billion in an advertising split, to Major League Baseball for the rights to its brand new Friday Night Baseball franchise. 

Apple's early efforts with baseball -- its first live sports initiative for that matter -- has been dinged for some early bugs, but it's also been praised for some modern livening of baseball's somewhat staid offering.

At least one streaming industry pundit raised surprise that Apple trumped Amazon for Sunday Ticket rights. 

"I had always assumed Amazon was the most likely home for this package, given their deep pockets, the proven success of scale sporting events on the Amazon platform, a successful, multi-year proven track record with Thursday Night Football, the AWS advanced stats partnership, and finally, the tremendous e-commerce synergies," wrote Erik Opeka, chief strategy officer for Cinedigm, on LinkedIn Monday afternoon. ■

Apple CEO Tim Cook said proposed new privacy and antitrust regulations being teed up could put iPhone users’ privacy and security at risk.

Cook spoke at the IAPP Global Privacy Summit Tuesday (April 12) in Washington.

He said Apple supports a strong, comprehensive national privacy law, but said he is “deeply concerned” about regulations “that would undermine privacy and security in service of some other aim.” That aim would be competition.

In the name of competition, Cook said, some are taking steps to allow apps without privacy protections to circumvent App Store safeguards and “track users against their will.”

One example is the Open Markets Act, which would reduce the control that Apple and Google have over their respective app stores.

Cook countered the argument that new regulations directed at app stores would simply give people more choice and cause no harm. He said taking away a more secure option would leave users with less choice, not more.

He said he wanted to make clear that Apple supports competition that drives innovation and recognizes that supporters of antitrust rules have good intentions. But if Apple is forced to allow unvetted apps onto its phones, he said, the unintended consequences will be “profound.”

He said Apple is obliged to speak up, and would continue to speak up, to convince well-intentioned policymakers not to undermine privacy in the process.

Regulations must be crafted to protect fundamental rights, he said, and there is much to gain if Washington gets it right. ■

Apple is developing a new subscription model that would provide pricey gadgets to consumers for ostensibly affordable monthly fees, according to Bloomberg, which said the new business scheme could be deployed as soon as the end of 2022.

The report provides unnamed sources and sketchy details, but has given the tech press all it needs to jump into speculation ... as in, what if everyone who owned an iPhone had access to services like Apple TV Plus?

Clearly, Apple likes the subscription model. In the first fiscal quarter of 2022, Apple reported revenue of nearly $20 billion from selling subscription-based services.

And it likes bundling its subscription services. 

In late 2020, Apple introduced its "Apple One" bundling strategy, packaging together services including Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade and iCloud storage in tiers ranging from $19.95 - $29.95 a month. 

Currently, you can buy devices like the highly popular iPhone from Apple in installments, paying for it in 12 - 24 monthly payments. That's a separate bill from your service subscriptions, but what if the device subscription were to be bundled with services like Apple TV Plus under the Apple One strategy?

With 113 million iPhone users in the U.S. alone, according to 2021 Statista data, that could dramatically increase the subscriber count, as yet unknown, for services like Apple TV Plus. 

Consider that there are only around 75 million U.S. subscribers for the leading subscription service, Netflix. 

Apple has goosed uptake of Apple TV Plus by offering the service for free promotional periods with the purchase of Apple hardware.

But if distribution of the subscription streaming service were permanently tethered to popular hardware, it could truly change the game in terms of Apple TV Plus scale. ■

These days, when Apple talks about its streaming service, Apple TV Plus, it’s not in a late reveal at the end of a big product rollout, as “just one more (very cool) thing.” It’s at the front, usually something to note as the company’s execs hurry on to the latest gee-whiz hardware announcements. 

Such was the case again Tuesday, when Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage in yet another slickly produced, pre-recorded hour-long pitch for a string of interesting new products. Right at the top, though, Cook stopped long enough to mention that the world’s most valuable company is getting into live sports, specifically Major League Baseball. 

“We're really excited about this,” Cook said. “This is going to be the best way to watch baseball” on the company’s various devices through Apple TV Plus. 

It wasn’t much of an announcement, a short trailer and a few lines about his excitement for a deal reported to be worth $85 million a year over seven years. 

That price is chicken feed, and not much of it, for a company that once again just reported the greatest quarter in the history of capitalism, raking in $83.4 billion in revenue over the holidays, up 29% over an also-excellent 2021.  

For its paltry poultry-dinner payout, Apple gets two exclusive games a week on Friday nights, whenever MLB resumes its lockout-delayed season. So, that’s something. 

But the modest deal actually represents a whole lot more for Apple, MLB, and how people consume live sports. Though Cook’s announcement was skimpy on details (specifics are difficult when MLB keeps cancelling games) there are lots of potential big issues here, whenever Friday Night Baseball finally debuts: 

> Will Apple create its own live broadcast team and production crew to handle these games? Creating such a team for only baseball, for two games in different locations on a single night, seems like a lot of organizational distraction and expense for modest return. That strongly suggests other sports programming is on the way, possibly even that much-rumored takeover of the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package after next season. 

> If this is only the start of Apple’s sports ambitions, will it also bid for upcoming college sports contracts from top-tier collegiate leagues such as the Big 10 and Pac-12 as they become available? College sports tend to be much more regional in their fan bases (just like baseball), and also create a lot of programming (just like baseball), especially if a deal includes women’s teams and non-revenue sports.  

> Does Apple partner with MLB.com, one of the OG league streaming operations in pro sports, to carry the games? For that matter, is this a dress rehearsal for a bigger partnership between Apple and MLB.com that might include the tech giant taking over MLB’s streaming-media operations? 

> Is Apple planning to create “shoulder” content to run around and between live streams, including talk shows, behind-the-scenes content, pre-game and post-game studio conversations and much else? Again, that’s a lot of time and money for something that would run only, say, 26 weeks a year, and maybe much less than that this year, given the intractable labor dispute. 

> How will Apple fill the time between innings? There’s a lot of time between innings in a baseball game. Typically, broadcasters and RSNs fill that time with a lot of lucrative ads. Will Apple finally get into running ads from other companies? That seems unlikely, given that using data to drive those ads would be counter to Apple’s oft-stated indifference to weaponizing data for commerce. Does that mean that Friday Night Baseball will mostly be running house ads for Major League Baseball, Apple products and TV Plus shows? How soon will we get tired of those?

> As a corollary to fewer or no ads, will game streams be shorter than the notoriously endless broadcasts and cablecasts now out there, because there aren’t ads, or very many of them? Will shorter games make for a better product, at a time when Major League Baseball is trying desperately to shorten games (which ran a record average of 3 hours, 10 minutes in 2021)? 

> These “exclusive” games mean no one else is running them anywhere, right? Cook said those games won’t be available to watch anywhere other than TV Plus. What does that mean for the already-ailing regional sports networks out there? Do they lose yet another slice of their programming, even as they’re already being shoved onto premium tiers and the ash heap of history? What does it mean for Sinclair’s planned streaming app, which will have geo-fenced games from a handful each of MLB and NHL teams?  

> Speaking of watching, who is going to watch baseball on a Friday night? It’s not prime time for TV for just about anyone. Throw in the aging demographic that is baseball fans, and this doesn’t seem to be a growth opportunity. On the other hand, if Apple is only running house ads, the only demographic that matters is that they’re fans of baseball and Apple. 

Other streaming services – Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, Paramount Plus, Vix Plus and of course ESPN Plus — have jumped strongly into streamed live college and pro sports, including from the NFL, English Premiere League soccer, the Olympics, NBA, and the NHL.  Indeed, MLB also just did a deal with Comcast’s Peacock, for another $30 million a year for Monday- and Wednesday-night games that formerly ran on ESPN. 

All the streaming services see live sports as a way to lock in a set of ardent fans, perhaps pulling them away from the traditional cable/broadcast bundle. 

Indeed, the more of these kinds of deals happen, the faster we’ll see cord-cutting accelerate (another 4.7 million households dropped cable service in 2021; only the “skinny bundle” virtual MVPDs saw any growth, according to Leichtman Research Group). 

As for Major League Baseball, suiting up with Apple is a win on several levels. It carves out a new source of revenue for a league that was battered economically during the pandemic, is getting killed in the court of public opinion over the lockout, and, as mentioned earlier, has an aging fan base. And new money is particularly useful when you’re fighting with your talent over who gets what share of the revenue pie. 

Add in the Peacock deal and baseball will be streamed on major services at least three nights a week, providing a potential off-ramp for MLB from dependence on that fading cable bundle. Who knows, it might even help MLB’s owners pay for all those really bad and hugely expensive signings they’ve made over the past few years. Probably not, but it may just be the beginning of baseball’s shift to a streaming future, with Apple by its side.  

Apple said it reached an agreement with Major League Baseball to begin airing weekly Friday Night Baseball double headers, a big swing into sports for Apple TV Plus.

The schedule will start as soon as baseball’s season begins. The season at this point is delayed by a lockout by owners negotiating a new labor deal with the players association.

Sports is becoming a big ticket for streaming services. Comcast's NBCUniversal had also reportedly been in talks to stream baseball via its Peacock direct-to-consumer platform. Amazon will exclusively stream Thursday Night Football. And Apple is reportedly talking With the NFL About Sunday Ticket and taking a stake in NFL Media. 

“Just like all baseball fans, we can’t wait for the season to open,” said Peter Stern, Apple’s VP of services. “Baseball has a special place in the heart of so many Apple customers — not just in the United States, but in many countries around the world. We’re proud to make Apple TV Plus the home for great baseball moments throughout the season.”

Apple’s games will be surrounded by a pre-game and post-game show. 

Apple will also be streaming MLB Big Inning, a live show featuring highlights and look-ins every weeknight during the season. 

“Apple is the ideal partner to bring ‘Friday Night Baseball’ to fans around the world,” said Noah Garden, MLB’s chief revenue officer. “Following milestones like the launch of At Bat on day one of the App Store in 2008 to the integration of Apple technology in ballparks across the country, this robust new game package is the perfect next collaboration in our long history of offering quality and innovative content to our fans. With national availability and international reach, MLB on Apple TV Plus offers an exciting new platform to fans that allows a wider audience to connect with the game.”

Friday Night Baseball will be available on Apple TV Plus in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, and will expand to additional countries at a later date. ■

Comcast has announced the native integration of Apple TV Plus on its U.S. pay TV and retail platforms. 

Starting Monday, Apple's SVOD service will be supported by Xfinity X and Xfinity Flex customer premises equipment, as well as smart TV's sold at Walmart powered by Comcast's XClass TV operating system. 

Apple TV Plus users will have access to the same X1 Voice Remote experience that users of Netflix and other already embedded services do -- they can say things like "Watch Ted Lasso," and the hit Apple TV Plus series will deploy before their eyes. 

Apple TV Plus already launched in December on Comcast's Sky devices (Sky Q and Sky Glass) in the UK and other parts of Europe.

To promote the integration, Apple will offer Xfinity X1, Flex and Stream customers, who are not already paying $4.99 a month to subscribe to its 28-month-old SVOD service, access to most popular Apple TV Plus original series and films from March 15-21. 

If they sign up by April 25, these customers are also eligible for a three-month free trial of the service. 

The move in some sense completes the full 180-degree turn made by both Apple and Comcast, which would have never imagined such an arrangement a decade ago. Apple, which used to confine its service's to its own devices, has proliferated Apple TV Plus to even Google TV. 

Once looking to compete directly with services like Netflix and Apple TV Plus, Comcast has long ceded its video business to an "aggregator of aggregators" approach. 

“With the launch of Apple TV Plus, our customers now have access to all of today’s most popular streaming services through our aggregated user experience and award-winning voice technology.” said Sam Schwartz, chief business development officer of Comcast, in a statement. “By leveraging our global technology platform, our partners can distribute apps on one tech stack to reach tens of millions of viewers.”

Added Peter Stern, Apple’s VP of services: “Apple TV Plus offers the highest quality programming from the finest creators in the world, and one of the best ways to enjoy it is on the big TV in your living room. Our work with Comcast lights up that experience for tens of millions of new devices, and we are thrilled that so many Comcast customers have a compelling way to enjoy their new favorite shows on Apple TV Plus."

Apple, the most valuable company in the world, is reportedly looking to make a huge deal with the National Football League, owner of the most powerful programming in television.

The NFL is looking for a home for NFL Sunday Ticket, its subscription service offering out-of-market games. 

It is also looking to sell 49% of NFL Media, which owns the NFL Networks, NFL RedZone and NFL.com.

Apple wants to swallow them both in one bite, according to Front Office Sports.

The Hail Mary of a deal would be a touchdown for Apple’s streaming service Apple TV Plus, which despite a handful of award-winning shows including Ted Lasso, is an also ran in the direct-to-consumer market.

More significantly, Apple could use the NFL to keep its iPhone and other gadgets one play ahead of its competitors.

Apple’s main challenger for the NFL Properties is reportedly Amazon, another big, rich tech company.

Amazon is already in business with the NFL, having acquired exclusive rights to the league’s Thursday Night Football packages. Amazon began promoting Thursday Night Football during the Super Bowl.

Also: DirecTV Mulls 'Co-Exclusive' Arrangement for NFL Sunday Ticket

Sunday Ticket has been with DirecTV for years, but DirecTV was spun off from AT&T and probably doesn’t have the financial firepower to compete with Apple or Amazon. Plus with cord cutting, the NFL has said that it was streaming to be a big part of how Sunday Ticket gets distributed. ■

Amazon and Apple remain the leading bidders to take over as the exclusive platform provider for NFL Sunday Ticket, once DirecTV's current license for the out-of-market games package expires at the end of the 2022 NFL season.

Speaking to inside sources, Sports Business News' John Ourand reports that one of the two tech giants will pay more than $2 billion a season for NFL Sunday Ticket, well above the $1.4 billion being currently paid by DirecTV. 

Also according to Ourand's report, DirecTV may maintain piece of NFL Sunday Ticket as the exclusive out-of-home provider, where it can continue to offer the service to venues like restaurants and bars. 

Also read: DirecTV Mulls 'Co-Exclusive' Arrangement for NFL Sunday Ticket

Disney, meanwhile, hasn't ended its quest to obtain the asset for ESPN, but the report said Disney management is cool to spending the kind of money that it might take to get the package. 

Amazon has already begun ramping up its NFL broadcast infrastructure after agreeing to pay the NFL a reported $1 billion a year to take over as the exclusive broadcast partner of Thursday Night Football. 

It was reported Monday that Amazon is in talks with just-retired longtime New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton about becoming an oniair personality for Thursday Night Football. 

A little more than three months after changing its name to Meta Platforms and a day after Wall Street returned the favor of a massive revenue guidance miss by cratering its market cap, analysts scrambled to make sense of it all. 

Facebook parent Meta lost about $232 billion in market capitalization Thursday (February 4) — the largest one-day drop by a single company in U.S. stock market history — after it said Q1 revenue would miss Wall Street forecasts by $2 billion, spurred by a combination of intense competition from TikTok, increasingly onerous privacy requirements from Apple Inc. and just plain bad luck. Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which creates the augmented reality and virtual reality products that are expected to be the building blocks of the metaverse, lost about $10.2 billion on revenue of $2.3 billion. 

While Q4 revenue at $33.7 billion was even with estimates, Meta said it lost about 1 million daily global users in the quarter, adding to concerns that its relevance is slipping with younger consumers. 

Meta’s dilemma is eerily similar to Netflix, which saw its stock fall 25% in January after it missed Q4 subscriber growth targets and said it would add just 2 million paying customers in Q1. Netflix has gained some of those losses back: It was trading at $405.18 on Friday afternoon, about even with the previous day.

Also: Netflix Isn’t Quite Dead Yet 

Meta shares fell more than 26% on Thursday, forcing analysts to rejigger their models for the stock and try to find some sense in such a dramatic miss. The stock fell another 2% on Friday, priced at $232.67 at 12:07 p.m. 

In report after report, analysts that follow the stock pointed to the surprising impact of short-form video juggernaut TikTok — even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on an earnings conference call that TikTok was “growing at a much faster rate” than Facebook’s own Reels short-form video service. 

At the same time, Apple’s new privacy measures for its iOS products are having a huge impact on ad revenue. On the conference call, Meta chief financial officer David Wehner said those iOS privacy requirements will cost Meta about $10 billion in lost revenue in 2022, which he called “a pretty significant headwind for our business.”

Most analysts were pretty shocked by the revenue impact, but kept as much optimism as they could for the company, maintaining their ratings on the stock but slashing their 12-month price targets by nearly $100. For many, their advice to investors was to ride out the storm, buy the stock at its new low-point and reap the benefits later.

Also: Metaverse or Meh-taverse? 

MoffettNathanson media analyst Michael Nathanson, in a research report entitled “Facebook: The Beginning of the End?” maintained his “buy” rating on the stock but dropped his price target from $420 to $380 per share. Evercore ISI Group analyst Mark Mahaney kept his “outperform” rating but slashed his price target to $350 from $430 per share, while Bernstein tech analyst Mark Shmulik maintained his “outperform” rating on the stock but dropped his price target from $400 to $350 per share. 

“There are days in this job that suck. Today is one of those days,” Shmulik wrote in a note to clients after Meta released its results. Shmulik noted that most analysts severely underestimated the impact of Apple’s decision to let iPhone and iPad users opt in or out of the identifiers for advertisers (IDFA) that apps use to track movement through the web and target ads accordingly. When users opt out, it makes those ads a lot less valuable.

While Shmulik and other analysts believe Facebook will eventually figure out a workaround to the IDFA, management didn’t help things during the earnings conference call by “striking a negative tone around the duration and cost (~$10B on ’22 revenues) of any potential long term fixes,” the Bernstein analyst wrote.

Nathanson, who has been a big believer that Facebook would exceed ad forecasts in the past, reduced his Q1 revenue estimate by $2 billion and his full-year 2022 revenue predictions by $12 billion, or 8%. Although he said Meta’s Q4 results were in line with most estimates, its Q1 guidance was “incredibly weak” and was a “headline grabber and not in a good way.”

Still, other analysts were optimistic of Facebook’s resilience, and saw the low stock price as a Netflix-like inflection point, referring to the streaming giant’s recent stock drop. In his note, Evercore‘s Mahaney said that Meta “could well be dead money for several months,” but remained a buyer of the stock because it is trading close to its 2018 trough multiple of 17 times cash flow, which could limit downside and because he believes the company’s new Q1 revenue guidance suggests that revenue trends are stabilizing.

Mahaney also is confident that Facebook’s Reels — its short-form video answer to TikTok — will succeed, and that its macro challenges are temporary.

“TikTok is a real issue, but primarily for Instagram, and much less so for Blue, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, FB Marketplace, etc.,” Mahaney wrote, adding that he still believes Meta has a compelling long-term business model.

“Meta Platforms has a robust combination of revenue growth (17% CAGR ‘21E-‘24E) and profitability (~40% GAAP Operating margins and 50%+ EBITDA margins in ‘21),” Mahaney wrote. “Their core Family of Apps operating margins of near 50% in FY21, supports the significant investment in Reality Labs. The FCF generation has been equally impressive: $39B in FY21. And this has allowed them to execute sizeable share buybacks ($40B+ in ‘21) that we believe are sustainable going forwards.” ■   

The Senate Judiciary Committee has overwhelmingly passed the bipartisan Open App Markets Act, according to its sponsors, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). The vote was 21-1 — with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) was the only nay — to favorably report the bill to a vote in the full Senate.

The legislation is billed by Blumenthal as “breaking Apple and Google’s ironclad grip on the multibillion-dollar app market,” including by stopping predatory fees on consumers and lowering barriers to rivals. Blackburn called it a response to market failure. She said she was not saying Big Tech is bad, but that it was clear that guard rails are now needed.

Defeated during the bill markup was an amendment offered by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) that would add language about Big Tech censorship of conservative political and religious voices. Blumenthal said the bill was not about political speech but about protecting consumers.

The explicit goal of the bill is to “reduce gatekeeper power in the app economy, increase choice, improve quality, and reduce costs for consumers.”

Reading like an app net neutrality rule for Apple and Google, the legislation would prevent a covered company from restricting the use of alternative in-app payment systems; or from favoring their own terms of distribution, pricing or conditions of sale; or penalize developers for using different pricing terms or conditions via another in-app payment system.

It prevents a Google or Apple, for example, from using info derived from a third-party app to compete with that same app.

In general, reads the bill, “a covered company shall not provide unequal treatment of apps in an app store through unreasonably referencing or ranking the apps of the covered company or any of its business partners over those of other apps.” The definition of “unreasonable referencing” includes algorithms that prioritize apps owned by the covered company or its partners but does not include “clearly disclosed” ads.

Violations would be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission since those violations will be considered unfair methods of competition, which the FTC has authority to police. In addition, any state attorney general can also bring a civil action based on a violation of the act and there is also a private right of action so that any developer can also sue, and get treble damages if they win.

The bill's co-sponsors include Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), John Kennedy (R-La.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

Praising passage was Consumer Reports, which has pushed for the legislation.

“Senators on both sides of the political aisle agree it is time to address the stranglehold that Apple and Google have on our smartphones," said Sumit Sharma, senior researcher for tech competition at Consumer Reports. "The Open App Markets Act will allow consumers to get better deals by introducing competition in payment systems on smartphones, and it will enable app developers to freely inform consumers about these cheaper alternatives.” ■

The Senate has weighed into what was described as an “overgrown standing army” of Big Tech monopolists, with Senate Antitrust Subcommittee chair Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) saying to the army of lobbyists that would try to take down a tough new antitrust law under consideration: “Bring it on.”

The bill, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, is aimed at preventing big online platforms like Apple, Google, Amazon and others from self-favoring conduct that leverages their dominance in search and apps and online commerce to suppress competition. A House version of the bill was also introduced in June, but the Senate version has a number of changes that would have to be reconciled.

Those new parts of the bill include clarifying that some types of “privacy-enhancing conduct” would be permitted, making sure that powerful platforms not publicly traded do not escape the bill’s coverage, and that subscription services like Amazon Prime Video and other streamers were not impacted.

The bill also now requires guidelines to be issued to the business community within nine months and a one-year period for covered platforms to come into compliance.

Klobuchar, a lead sponsor of the bill, said that helped the measure strike the right balance, but the hearing featured much striking out at provisions of the law from both sides.

While the bill did eventually pass out of committee Thursday, there is no guarantee it can achieve the necessary votes in the full Senate. 

While attacking Big Tech is one of the few issues that unites Democrats and Republicans, the bill being marked up by the Senate Judiciary Committee was hardly a bipartisan beatdown of the Big Tech pinata. In fact, it appeared to divide not only Democrat from Republican, but Democrat from Democrat.

There was disagreement on the content of the bill, the consequences — or unintended consequences — of the bill, and the process that got it to markup on Thursday (January 20).

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), ranking member of the antitrust panel, made it clear the bill was not, in its current form, the way to go. He said he could not support it, and he was not alone.

Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said he still had issues that needed to be resolved before he could vote for it on the Senate floor.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) had big problems with the bill's focus on regulating the behavior of the biggest big tech companies — Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon — while allowing others to engage in the same conduct. She said it could be a “very dangerous” law that could tip the balance of power toward big foreign firms not covered by the bill.

Feinstein said the bill had major security problems because it required companies to take down protections, a complaint lodged by some Republicans. She said she would oppose the bill and said it should have gotten a full committee hearing.

Lee also said one of his issues was there had been no legislative hearing on the bill. He conceded that it had been “mentioned” on occasion in other Big Tech antitrust hearings, but that did not equate with a legislative hearing on the bill itself.

The hearing featured a testy exchange between Feinstein and Klobuchar, with Klobuchar saying one claim Feinstein made about administration concerns with the bill was “not true.”

Lee asked how much pro-competitive behavior could get caught in the bill and end up with the unintended consequence of removal of popular products and services that helped consumers.

The bill potentially fines violators 15% of a company's total revenue, which Lee said would just line government coffers. He said the penalties were not tied to actual harms, and could just push online platforms to stop working with third parties.

Lee also said he was concerned about giving federal agencies sweeping new power to redefine markets. He said that’s something that has never worked and he didn’t see why it would now.

He raised another hot-button issue. He said deep state bureaucrats should not be given control over Big Tech, and said the bill should address Big Tech censorship, rather than giving the keys over to the Federal Trade Commission to control those companies then use it against Republicans.

Klobuchar said she was shocked by some of the things Lee said and that the hearing — in December — where the bill was raised was hardly perfunctory and the Republicans' own witness supported the bill. Klobuchar said there have been four separate hearings related to the issues the bill addresses.

The American Edge Project has taken out ads on Washington media outlets opposing the bill and claiming it could hurt America's tech edge globally. Klobuchar conceded at the hearing that the bill's supporters did not have the money to take out TV ads showing their support, but were behind it nonetheless.

The bill did unite strange political bedfellows Klobuchar and conservative Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). Hawley said the bill goes “right at competitive conduct." Hawley is one of the biggest Big Tech critics. He disagreed with Lee that the bill could, ironically, strengthen Big Tech, though he agreed with the Big Tech/Big Government alliance and about censoring speech.

Klobuchar warned that there would be attempts to delay the bill with a raft of amendments. Lee took issue with that, saying his amendments were an effort to make the bill better, not kill it.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said the bill was an overreach and needed more work, but said he would not call for a vote on the 40-plus amendments he had filed. His issues included who was covered, what it meant by making “preferencing” illegal and what the consequences of illegal “preferencing” would be. Another 40-some amendments were also withdrawn, but Klobuchar said she would stay there day and night to finish the markup.

Small Hopes for Compromise

While the bill made it out of committee, it was tough to see how there could be a meeting of the minds on exactly the way forward, particularly with the concerns addressed by many Democrats. Some of those Democrats said they could not vote for the bill in committee, others said they would vote for it, but could not vote for it in the full Senate without changes.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) backed an amendment to allow for individuals to sue Big Tech over violations of the new law, pointing out that support was a reversal from the norm, where Democrats push for private rights of action and Republicans oppose, including himself. But Cruz said Big Tech's conduct was so egregious he was ready to “unleash the trial lawyers.”

Some Democrats argued that the bill unfairly targeted conduct by larger players, but Cruz said that the bill was targeted to the large companies because “they were the monopolists.”

He ultimately withdrew all his amendments, saying he looked forward to working on the issue and would vote for the bill out of committee, but reserved judgment on a full-Senate vote.

Cruz used some of his time on bill discussion to agree with Lee that censorship of conservative speech by Big Tech is “pervasive, pernicious and brazen.” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) added that he saw Big Tech as a “killing field” for the truth. 

“This bill endangers U.S. digital leadership, and puts consumers’ security and privacy at risk," said Matt Schruers, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association after the 15-6 vote to report the bill to the full Senate. "Rather than drafting general rules to protect consumers’ welfare, the bill regulates the business models of a handful of companies.  This bill is European-style industrial policy, not competition policy.”

Consumer Reports, which got a shout-out during the hearing over its support of the bill, was understandably pleased it made it out of committee.

“The bill will stop the largest online platforms from imposing their self-serving rules on markets and society," said Sumit Sharma, senior researcher for tech competition at Consumer Reports. "The bill will benefit consumers by making it easier to install, choose, and use alternative apps and online services. It will remove the roadblocks that the largest online platforms have put up to hinder innovation by competitors. We will see more innovation as a result of the bill, which will create more choices for consumers.”■

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to hold a markup this week on a bill to promote competition in an app market dominated by Apple and Google.

The January 20 markup, where a bill is amended and voted on (or sometimes not), will be on the Open App Markets Act.

The bipartisan bill was introduced back in August 2021 by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), joined by pretty much their polar political opposite, Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

“This step toward Judiciary Committee consideration shows strong bipartisan support for our Open App Markets Act—to stop Apple and Google from crushing competitors and undercutting consumers,” said Sen. Blumenthal. “Breaking the ironclad grip of these two behemoths on the multi-billion dollar app market is long overdue. This measure has solid momentum.”

“The Senate Judiciary committee’s markup of the Open App Markets Act will bring us one step closer to holding big tech companies like Apple and Google accountable,” said Blackburn. She said the act will allow consumers access to apps not "rubber stamped" by those giant.

Also: Apple Reaches Settlment with App Developers

The explicit goal of the bill is to "reduce gatekeeper power in the app economy, increase choice, improve quality, and reduce costs for consumers."

The bill, which reads like an app net neutrality rule for edge providers, would prevent a covered company from restricting the use of alternative in-app payments systems; or from favoring their own terms of distribution, pricing or conditions of sale; or penalize developers for using different pricing terms or conditions via another in-app payment system.

The bill prevents a Google or Apple from using info derived from a third-party app to compete with that app.

In general, reads the bill, "a Covered Company shall not provide unequal treatment of apps in an app store through unreasonably referencing or ranking the apps of the covered company or any of its business partners over those of other apps."

"Unreasonable referencing" includes algorithms that prioritize apps owned by the covered company or its partners but does not include "clearly disclosed" ads.

Violations will be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission since they will be considered unfair methods of competition, which the FTC has section 5 authority to police. In addition, any state attorney general can also bring a civil action based on a violation of the act and there is also a private right of action so that any developer can also sue, and get treble damages if the win. ■

Major League Baseball may be stuck in yet another labor fight, the sport’s barons locking out players this offseason to force themselves to stop paying humongous contracts to washed-out sluggers, banjo-hitting infielders, and noodle-armed pitchers. Good luck with stopping that force of nature. 

But the stoppage hasn’t held up other parts of the game from moving forward, most notably this week’s news that Apple TV Plus is in negotiations with MLB to take over the weekly package of regular-season telecasts that ESPN gave up in renewing its contract with the leagues. 

The Apple-MLB negotiations for the Monday and Wednesday night games are said by the New York Post to be “serious,” which is, I suppose, a relief. But far more importantly, should the deal come together, it would mark Apple’s first move into live sports, opening a new front in its increasingly “serious” efforts to make Apple TV Plus more than a giveaway for iPhone buyers. 

Certainly, Apple TV Plus has been giving viewers more reasons to stick around lately. Just this week, the movie CODA, and episodic series Ted Lasso and The Morning Show all snagged SAG Awards nominations. That suggests the best of TV Plus is resonating with fans and critics. 

But one of baseball’s great advantages is that it creates a lot of content every season. There are 30 teams, playing 162 games a season, games that typically last between 2 1/2 and 4 hours each. Add in months of off-season hot-stove conversations, two months of spring training, and the post-season playoffs, and there’s a big programming footprint to be built even beyond the games themselves. 

MLB is believed to be seeking as much as $350 million a year for the semi-exclusive rights to those games (as before, local services would still be able to show the hometown teams they have deals with). 

That sounds expensive until you realize how much all the big streaming companies are paying for content more generally, and how little even those gargantuan sums impact what Apple is worth. 

Wells Fargo just put out data estimating programming spending by the nine largest streaming services will jump 10% this year, to $140.5 billion, on the way to $175 billion collectively by 2025. 

And Apple, the world’s most valuable public company, crested $3 trillion in market capitalization last week, before settling back on Wednesday to a mere $2.86 trillion. 

Apple also has somewhere around $191 billion in cash in its back pocket, even as it keeps buying back stock and investing in R&D on new ventures like driverless cars and virtual-reality headsets. Simply put, a $350 million baseball contract for Apple is the corporate equivalent of walking-around money, what it found between the cushions of Tim Cook’s office couch. 

Such a deal potentially sets up an expensive arms race with Amazon, which already is set to spend $1 billion a year for 15 NFL games per season beginning this fall. That deal, perhaps like the baseball package, is only semi-exclusive: local fans will still be able to watch their home teams play on Thursday nights with an over-the-air broadcast. Everybody else has to go online.

Expect more deals like this one that carve off a piece of the sports pie that traditional outlets can’t afford to do anymore. 

Next up as a potential tech titan target: the NFL Sunday Ticket package that DirecTV is giving up after next season. It might look nice as a premium sell-through for Alphabet’s YouTube TV skinny bundle, a bookend to Amazon’s Thursday night programming, or, again, a newly sports-friendly Apple TV Plus. 

Squaring off the tech titans in other rights deals would be both highly lucrative for sports leagues looking for their next sugar daddy, and potentially, ahem, game-changing for  Hollywood media companies trying to protect legacy broadcast and cable operations as they evolve into streaming. 

Live sports (and to a lesser extent, news) has been the bulwark sustaining the traditional pay-TV ecosystem amid continuing cord-cutting. This past year, NFL games comprised 75 of the top 100 highest-rated shows on TV, Sportico said. 

Should that changeover happen, it will set up yet another self-reinforcing and vicious cycle of diminished broadcast/cable programming, with fewer people paying to watch whatever’s left, further eroding the networks’ ability to keep paying those amounts. 

And don’t forget that the leagues themselves appear likely to create their own subscription streaming packages, cutting out middlemen like the networks, while still keeping local control over hometown telecasts on traditional outlets. 

“We expect MLB and NBA to work toward league-specific streaming platforms carrying OTT feeds of local/regional games seamlessly integrated with their out-of-market streaming packages (likely in conjunction with a streaming partner and as many teams as possible),” according to this week’s 2022 predictions from LightShed Partners. “Lastly, there could be RSN-specific OTT strategies in large markets (who decline to be a part of the league-based offerings), such as MSGN and LA Sports Net.”

All of this signals yet more challenges for Sinclair, the broadcaster group turned NextGen TV cheerleader/AVOD operator/local news aggregator/nation’s largest regional sports network operator. 

Despite formidable obstacles, Sinclair appears to be close to securing video rights to NBA teams that it needs to create its own streaming service to compete in some major markets with ESPN/ESPN Plus, with a debut perhaps as soon as April, when baseball’s season is putatively set to start. 

If and when that service launches, it may give carriers such as Charter an excuse to put Sinclair’s sports networks on a premium tier, further reducing income and viewership for those networks. 

That’s definitely a problem for Sinclair. But Apple’s newfound interest in live sports suggests another level of engagement by Cupertino in the future of streaming. For that, all the competitors should worry.

Apple is paying a reported $225 million to director Joe Kosinksi to acquire a Formula 1-themed racing movie starring Brad Pitt. 

According to former Hollywood Reporter top editor Matt Beloni, who now publishes the inside-Hollywood Substack newsletter Puck, the pricey deal comes includes a $40 million fee for Pitt to produce and star in the film. The agreement also calls for an exclusive theatrical window. 

Kosinkis is known for the 2017 wildfire fighting-themed tearjerker Only the Brave, as well as the highly anticipated (and highly delayed) Tom Cruise-led sequel Top Gun: Maverick.

As for why we're suddenly interested in the breathless churn of Hollywood projection development news: Netflix has openly stated its interest in expanding on the success of its docu-series Formula 1: Fight to Survive with a possible poaching of Formula 1-series broadcast rights from ESPN, with the current deal set to expire after the 2022 racing season. 

“A few years ago, the rights to Formula 1 were sold,” Netflix Co-CEO Reed Hastings told Germany's Der Spiegel in September. “At that time, we were not among the bidders. Today, we would think about it.”

Would Apple overpay for a project just to lane-block a FAANG rival from a piece that would enable an organic entry into live sports? 

It is Apple and Amazon that is the true "favorite" in the bid to become the next home of NFL Sunday Ticket when the out-of-market games package becomes available after the 2022 pro football season, The Athletic reports.

Two weeks ago, it was reported that Amazon has the inside track to NFL Sunday Ticket, which has resided with DirecTV ever since the live games programming package first launched in the early 1990s. It's widely assumed that DirecTV, which was recently spun off from AT&T, will not renew its license for Sunday Ticket, for which it currently pays around $1.5 billion a season. 

Amazon, after all, just paid $1 billion to secure the rights to the NFL's Thursday Night Football franchise starting next season. The league also works with Amazon Web Services to provide stats, among many other entanglements. 

Citing unnamed sources close to the NFL, however, The Athletic has an allure for league officials in that its a pure-play technology company, marketing a consumer product, the iPhone, that's even bigger in the American consumer consciousness than football. 

Also Read: NFL Plans Monday Night Wild Card Playoff Game

Amazon, according to The Athletic’s narrative, is merely a “retailer.”

“So that diversifies the league — or the league’s always believed in an inclusive diversified kind of network mix,” said former Fox Sports executive turned consultant Patrick Crakes, to the subscription sports news site. “Apple is a different company than Amazon, even though people talk about them in the same breath. They’re very different. So I can see how the league might view that as a great diversification to their portfolio for the next decade.”

It's not the first time Apple's name has come up recently in the NFL Sunday Ticket discussion. In June, another paywalled insider news source, The Information, published a report indicating Apple's desire to pursue a license for the franchise. 

The Information based this take largely on the fact that Apple poached Amazon’s head of sports content, James DeLorenzo, last year. 

Of course, neither Amazon or Apple — or the NFL, for that matter — are commenting on any of these early reports. 

Improved battery life, storage and cameras, as well as faster chips highlight Apple's new line of its signature smart phones, the iPhone 13, which was formally introduced Tuesday at the California Streaming event.

The anticipated upgrade isn't a revolutionary one, with the popular smart phones keeping the form factor of the iPhone 12 intact. But there are notable improvements

One of the more interesting feature upgrades across the four new models, which start at $699, is a bigger battery, which improves the operational time span of the 5.4-inch base model iPhone Mini by 90 minutes, and that of the regular sized (6.1-inch) base iPhone 13 by two and a half hours. 

The base iPhone 13 models are also 28% brighter, and all four devices feature Apple's own A15 Bionic chipset for improved speed and performance. 

The 12-megapixel camera is now capable of grabbing 47% more light, and a new Cinematic Mode automatically adjusts focus to account for what the subject is doing. 

Notably, the two new pricey "Pro" models include Super Retina XDR display with ProMotion, featuring an adaptive refresh rate of up to 120Hz. 

And storage has been upgraded across the board, too, with the baseline flash memory space upped from 64 gigabytes to 128 GB. Notably, the two Pro models, which start at $999, can be equipped with 1 terabyte of storage. 

Apple introduced these iPhone models alongside refreshments for its iPad and iWatch product lines. 

So little guys everywhere in tech world celebrated Friday after a judge decided that maybe Epic had a case against Apple over the ways it runs, at great profit, its vast App Store. 

The actual decision by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, whose jurisdiction includes Silicon Valley and San Francisco, was initially perceived as a blow to Apple, but further investigation suggests something less damning, but definitely still a deal. 

The decision’s new strictures on the App Store edifice (and by extension, other company’s app stores) indeed are likely to be useful to the big streaming video services, dating apps, game publishers and the like whose well-known apps sit at the top of the charts. 

They’re the ones with the resources and motivation to take advantage of what Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said is now possible on Apple’s store: 

“Apple Inc. and its officers, agents, servants, employees, and any person in active concert or participation with them (“Apple”), are hereby permanently restrained and enjoined from prohibiting developers from (i) including in their apps and their metadata buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to In-App Purchasing and (ii) communicating with customers through points of contact obtained voluntarily from customers through account registration within the app.”

So, to translate, if you have a separate way for people to pay you directly, outside of your app, go for it. Now you can link to that payment function in your app, and also market it separately to customers if they give you permission. It’s easy to envision, say, Disney taking quick advantage so it can further market the living heck-ness out of its SVOD bundle beyond the gazillions it already spends on TV advertising for Disney Plus et al.

Indeed, Match Group finance chief Gary Swidler said his company is already trying to figure how the decision will let it keep some portion of the $500 million its big dating services send to Apple each year. 

But Swidler disputed one analyst’s estimate that the decision might save Match $80 million a year. There’s still too many unknowns to make that kind of projection with any authority, he said. 

For instance, how many subscribers will actually click through to an app’s home site or payment system, go through the laborious process of entering credit card information, overcome any festering concerns about the security and trustworthiness of a company they may not know well, and then hit “pay?” It’s one of the great challenges of e-commerce generally, and something that the App Store solves seamlessly and safely in exchange for its huge vig. 

For big apps like Netflix, that’s probably a lot of customers, who already have to go outside the streaming giant’s iOS app to pay because the company long ago decided it didn’t like sharing at least this part of its revenue stream (don’t get me started on password sharing). 

But the calculus is likely to be far different for that interesting little game or productivity app that just launched on iOS. For them, the judge’s decision will provide little succor any time soon. Those apps must weigh the time and expense of building a separate payment system, or more likely, contracting it out, or keeping it simple and allowing Apple to the job quickly and painlessly and expensively. Pick your poison. 

The decision is unlikely to make a huge impact on the bottom line of the world’s most valuable company. Yes, shares dropped Friday after the decision by more than $5, to about $149 apiece after a long and profitable run-up since mid-March had sent shares soaring nearly a third. 

As it is, investors still own a company valued at $2.46 trillion, just hours before it holds its annual iPhone-a-palooza to detail what’s cool enough in this fall’s smartphones to generate another $135 billion or so in sales. That money train appears likely to keep chugging along, regardless of the Epic case’s final outcome. 

And Epic thought so little of the decision that it immediately announced it would appeal, while Apple proclaimed victory, and the preservation of the safety and sanctity of the app store.

In response, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney tweeted, “Today’s ruling isn’t a win for developers or for consumers. Epic is fighting for fair competition among in-app payment methods and app stores for a billion consumers.”

More likely to make an impact long term are what happens within Apple itself, probably prodded along at the point of a regulator’s or legislator’s pen. 

For instance, Japan and South Korea regulators had already knocked a few bricks out of Apple’s walled garden, bricks that Apple said it would also remove elsewhere. And we can expect regulatory and legislative reforms soon enough in the United States, or more likely, the European Union, India or China. Those changes in one big market may in turn trickle down to everyone else.

Chances are, this decision will be something less than revolutionary, but more than meaningless, hovering in that ‘meh’ middle that columnists hate. But what does matter is that it marks a significant change in the operations of one of the greatest engines of commerce in the history of capitalism. For that, it should remembered. 

A federal judge on Friday ruled that Apple cannot force Epic Games to use its online payment system in order to sell its games in the Apple App Store.

Apple has 90 days to comply. 

With Apple and Google both grabbing as much as 30% in commissions off sales made in their respective app stores, the ruling, made by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, could have major effects on a business that generated as much as $100 million for Apple over just a 30-month period, according to earlier trial testimony. 

The ruling, coming after a three-week trial in May, also removed Apple's ability to restrict App Store companies from communicating directly with their customers using contact info gleaned during signups for app services conducted in the Apple App Store. 

Both Apple and Google were sued by Epic Games in August of last year, after the company began selling in-game trinkets for its popular online videogame, Fortnite, through third-party vendors, and Fortnite was subsequently pulled from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store for alleged policy violations. 

Gonzalez' ruling, however, stopped far short of Epic Games' full anti-monopolist ambitions. For example, the judge refused to compel Apple to open its iPhone platform to third-party app stores. 

"Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws," court documents read. "Success is not illegal. The final trial record did not include evidence of other critical factors, such as barriers to entry and conduct decreasing output or decreasing innovation in the relevant market."

Apple said in a statement: "As the Court recognized ‘success is not illegal. Apple faces rigorous competition in every segment in which we do business, and we believe customers and developers choose us because our products and services are the best in the world."

Epic didn't immediately release a statement of its own, but the verdict will almost undoubtedly be appealed.

Added advocacy group Fight for the Future: “Unfortunately, this court decision does nothing to address the real harm of Apple’s restrictive and monopolistic app store policies. As long as Apple maintains an authoritarian stranglehold over what software millions of people can and can’t run on their phones, the company will be actively helping repressive governments undermine human rights and censor apps used by journalists, dissidents, and vulnerable communities. The bottom line is that you can’t be a values-driven privacy company and an aspiring monopoly at the same time."

The Parents Television and Media Council (PTC), which has turned its focus to streamed content, had some encouraging words for Apple TV Wednesday (Sept. 1) and its comedy, Ted Lasso, now in its sophomore season.

Citing the half hour comedy about an optimistic American football turned European football coach, PTC said more streaming services should follow that lead.

"Audiences – and particularly families – have always wanted lighter and more positive entertainment, but Hollywood has been reluctant to produce it. Given the popularity of Apple TV’s Ted Lasso, it appears Hollywood is finally taking notice of the desire for aspirational content. We are here to cheer this trend on and to add our voices to those calling for more uplifting entertainment," said PTC President Tim Winter in a statement.

Winter said Lasso's aspirational content includes "frequent explicit language and other content that may be inappropriate for children," but that the industry should look more to that than what he called the "obscenity-laden darkness that is so ubiquitous in entertainment programming."

Apple said Friday that it will "clarify" that app developers don't have to use its App store to accept payments, and will also give qualifying news outlets a cut of subscription revenue from Apple News.

The tech giant said that and other changes--including boosting "rigorous journalism and a free and independent press"--resolve a class action suit (Cameron et al v. Apple Inc.) filed by developers, pending acceptance of that settlement by a federal court.

Also Read: New Bill Would Fight App Store 'Bullying'

To boost 'rigorous journalism," Apple said it will launch a News Partner Program, in which news outlets that give their customers access to Apple News using Apple News Format will get a 15% commission on subscriptions to that app.

Big Tech has been under pressure from some in Congress to compensate the news it aggregates.

Apple said the settlement "clarifies that developers can share purchase options with users outside of their iOS app; expands the price points developers can offer for subscriptions, in-app purchases, and paid apps; and establishes a new fund to assist qualifying U.S. developers."

Apple also agreed to allow developers to use email to share information about payment outside iOS app and said it would issue an annual transparency report.

The fund to help smaller developers will be for those that have made $1 million or less for all of their apps in a calendar year, which works out to be 99% of all app developers.

"With the updates announced today, the App Store continues to evolve into an even better business opportunity for developers, while maintaining a safe and trusted marketplace for users," Apple said.

The language of the announcement was all about making things better and clarifying, rather than suggesting the company was correcting anything that had been wrong.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who backed the Open App Markets Act, was pleased with the settlement, but was not giving Apple any love.

“Apple’s concession is a powerful sign that Apple and Google’s stranglehold over app store markets is purely self-serving," he said in a statement. "These Big Tech giants thought they could get away with squashing competition to pocket hefty windfalls—all while insisting their ironclad grip on app markets serves the interests of consumers or developers. This marks a significant step forward, but does not rectify the full and vivid range of market abuses and practices still widespread across app markets that my and Senator Blackburn’s Open App Markets Act would address. Today’s move only adds to the momentum and further exposes rampant anticompetitive abuses in the app markets. The fox guarding the hen house status quo will remain until there are clear and enforceable rules for Apple and Google to play by. I look forward to advancing the Open App Markets Act when the Senate reconvenes this fall.”