Fox Sports will launch its new exclusive Major League Soccer package Saturday, with a major focus on providing linear TV exposure for the league's 28th season.

Fox Sports will distribute approximately 34 regular-season games as part of the four-year deal, with at least 15 regular-season games on Fox. The remainder of the games will air on FS1. Fox Deportes will air all Fox and FS1 telecasts in Spanish.

Fox will open up its coverage on February 25 with Nashville SC-New York City FC, while FS1 on Sunday will air the Seattle Sounders FC-Colorado Rapids contest, according to Fox Sports. 

Fox Sports’s MLS deal does not include streaming rights, which Apple TV purchased as part of a 10-year deal that includes all MLS regular season and postseason games. Apple TV's MLS Season Pass will feature all MLS regular and post season games for $14.99 per month.

Still, Fox Sports President and CEO Eric Shanks said that the deal emphasizes the continued value and importance of live sports programming on linear TV.

Also: Eric Shanks, Fox Sports Find Success With a Time-Tested Playbook

“Sure, [MLS] did an [Apple TV] streaming deal, but they really wanted to have games on broadcast every week,” he said.■

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.  ■

Major League Soccer will kick off its 2021 regular season this weekend with a Saturday evening game on Fox (Austin FC vs LAFC) and Sunday afternoon telecast on ABC (LA Galaxy vs Inter Miami), as part of a busy TV sports weekend across cable and broadcast networks. 

On the combat sports front, Fox will feature a primetime Saturday night boxing match headlined by a super welterweight bout between Tony Harrison and Bryant Perrella. Triller will also step into the boxing week on Saturday with a PPV fight card featuring YouTube star Jake Paul facing off against former MMA fighter Ben Askren. 

Read also: Triller Looking to Shake Up PPV Event Category

ESPN on Saturday will telecast a UFC Fight Night mixed martial arts card culminating in a main event bout between Robert Whittaker and Kevin Gastelum. 

In other sports, ABC will air a primetime Saturday night game between the Golden State Warriors and the Boston Celtics.

CBS will air final round coverage of the PGA RGB Heritage Golf tournament on Saturday and Sunday, while NBC will offer NHL game telecasts on both Saturday and Sunday afternoon. 

NBC will also air on Sunday the Grand Prix of Alabama IndyCar race, while Fox will telecast live the Toyota Owners 400 NASCAR Cup Series race.  

ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball telecast will feature the Atlanta Braves against the Chicago Cubs. 

College and pro football games as well as mixed martial arts action are on the menu for sports fans as the industry heads into the Thanksgiving week.

The NFL’s 11th week on Sunday will feature an NBC Sunday Night Football matchup between AFC West rivals Kansas City Chiefs and Las Vegas Raiders. Other national game telecasts from CBS (New England at Houston) and Fox (Green Bay at Indianapolis) are also on the docket.

The college football schedule is highlighted by Saturday afternoon contests between third-ranked Ohio State and ninth-ranked Indiana on Fox and fourth-ranked Clemson and Florida State on ABC. Primetime games feature 14th-ranked Oklahoma State and 18th-ranked Oklahoma on ABC, and 20th-ranked USC and Utah on ESPN.

The UFC will step into the octagon Saturday night for its UFC 255 pay-per-view event, which will feature as its main event the Alex Perez-Deiveson Figueiredo featherweight championship. The card will also feature women’s flyweight champion Valentina Shevchenko defending her title against Jennifer Maia.

NBC will offer Premier League soccer coverage on Saturday, while NBCSN will air league games on Saturday and Sunday. FS1 and ESPN will feature Major League Soccer coverage on Sunday. Meanwhile, Golf Channel will provide coverage of the PGA’s RSM Classic on Saturday and Sunday.

The emergence of over-the-top and streaming services into the increasingly crowded competition for sports rights has upped the ante for league programming, but analysts are split on whether the inclusion of deep-pocketed tech companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook will be enough to maintain the hefty increases of the most recent past.

That could be good news for pay TV distributors, but not so much for content owners — especially as two well-known sports rights properties are up for grabs in the next year: the National Football League’s Thursday Night Football package and the Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial arts package now owned by Fox Sports.

Thursday Night Football rights, currently shared by broadcasters CBS and NBC (and simulcast on the league’s own channel, NFL Network), are slated to expire later this year. The property got a taste of what could come when online retailer Amazon won the bidding for streaming rights for the package in April. Its $50 million offer, which puts games on the Amazon Prime Video platform, was five times the $10 million Twitter paid last season and, to some, set the tone for negotiations for larger, more popular packages.

The math is pretty simple, according to Pivotal Research Group senior research analyst – advertising Brian Wieser. “More demand for the same amount of rights should be inflationary,” he said.

Essential Appeal of Sports
Sports has become even more of a hot property for programmers as viewership has fragmented and with consumers just as likely to watch content on their phones or tablets as their living room TV screens. As audiences have scattered, sports watching has been the one constant.

Games are appointment viewing and best watched on larger screens in the home, complete with commercial interruptions, in step with the prevailing business model for most traditional networks.

But declining subscriber numbers at networks such as ESPN indicate that sports may not be quite as invincible as once believed. Telsey Advisory Group media analyst Tom Eagan pointed to declining ratings for NFL games last year — down 9% in the regular season and 6% for the playoffs — as an example.

While some of that ratings decline may have been due to a rather contentious presidential election that drew more viewers to news channels, poor matchups and the absence of big stars early in the season, Eagan said that digital video services are putting more resources into other types of content.

“It seems that most of these companies, ironically enough, are more comfortable with original programming,” Eagan said. “I think it’s because it casts a wider net than sports does.”

The length of most sports deals — 10 years, in some cases — has caused some distributors to pause, Eagan added, especially since the TV business is changing so rapidly. Ten years ago there were no virtual MVPDs and Netflix was just beginning to offer streaming media, making most of its money by selling DVDs through the mail. Who knows what new distribution platform could emerge in a decade’s time?

“I think media companies want as much flexibility as they can get right now,” Eagan said. “When you sign these deals, you have to be specific about what the rights are. And it’s hard to be specific about rights if you don’t know what the platform might be.”

In the past, rightsholders have been well aware of their power in the ever-evolving TV landscape and have been more than willing to wield it, as evidenced by the huge premiums networks paid for sports rights over the past few years. But as other big rights deals come up for renewal in the next five years, there is an increasing belief that the big premiums paid for sports rights in the past won’t be maintained.

It wasn’t so long ago that hefty increases were de rigueur in the sports rights business. In 2014, when ESPN, Fox Sports and Time Warner Inc.’s Turner networks agreed to pay a collective $1.52 billion per year for the rights to Major League Baseball games, that price was double the $760 million paid for the same rights previously. Last year, when Turner and ESPN agreed to pay $2.54 billion per year for National Basketball Association rights, that figure was 173% higher than the $930 million per year the parties previously paid for the same games.

With tech giants like Amazon and Facebook — which offers college football games via its Stadium: Live home page and has rights for 20 Major League Baseball and 22 Major League Soccer games this year — getting into the game, those prices were only expected to get higher.

Canaccord Genuity senior equity analyst Michael Graham isn’t convinced that Amazon and other streaming companies will invest heavily in sports programming, though. While he acknowledged Amazon’s willingness to pay top dollar for TNF streaming rights, he finds it a big leap to go from that level of spending to the billions of dollars that would be required to be a serious bidder for major sports like the NFL, NBA or Major League Baseball.

“Amazon came to the table in a strong way to get those rights, but it’s mostly just a test case,” Graham said of the TNF investment. “It’s possible they may move more into sports, but it’s super-duper expensive and there is no direct revenue associated with that content spend.”

Graham said that for services like Amazon Prime and Netflix, which have no advertising, the payback for investing in content is in the number of additional subscribers that content brings. He doesn’t think making a big commitment to sports will translate into enough new customers. Other analysts feel the same way, but note that digital companies could invest in smaller packages, like perhaps Monday Night Football, which is currently locked up by ESPN until 2021.

ESPN paid about $1.9 billion per year for MNF rights, according to MoffettNathanson senior analyst Michael Nathanson.

In a presentation to team owners and executives at Evanta’s Global Sports Summit conference in July, BTIG media analyst Rich Greenfield said that he believed Monday Night Football would be a good fit for either Amazon or Apple. He observed that Amazon Prime uses content most often as a retention tool.

“Even if there is nothing on Amazon Video that you care about this month, you’re still a subscriber for shipping, or you’re using your Alexa for music,” Greenfield said at the July conference. “They’re trying to make it so that there is always something. That’s why Monday Night Football would fit in great. Just another reason to be a Prime subscriber.”

Amazon did agree to pay $50 million for Thursday Night Football streaming rights — five times the earlier price — but would it be willing to pay the same premium for the full Thursday-night package or for Monday Night Football or Sunday games?

Stepping Up to Monday Nights?
Graham said a Monday Night Football bid might make sense for Amazon or another streamer, but he isn’t expecting a big commitment.

“It makes sense directionally,” Graham said. “Amazon does things on a small scale. Sometime in the next several years, with the exception of Netflix, there is likely to be more intensive experimentation around sports content. It might be most logically with Facebook, because you can have the social media commentary and sharing around that content which could help to monetize it more fully.”

As always, competition will be key. Pricing has a tendency to go higher the more bidders that are involved. And with traditional networks desperate to keep their dwindling subscriber base intact, the entrance of an Amazon, Apple or Facebook into the bidding can only be good for the content owners.

“Will there be the competition among the digital companies to drive those rights values up?” Greenfield said. “I don’t think we know yet, but I think that will be the single biggest swing factor in determining the future of sports rights values from where we are today.”

NeuLion and Major League Soccer will keep their streaming partnership going for a seventh year after striking a renewal for the 2016 season that will factor in some enhancements to MLS LIVE, the league's OTT, multi-screen subscription service.

MLS doesn’t break out specific sub numbers for MLS LIVE, but said the over-the-top subscription offering grew its base by more than 60% for the 2015 season.

That offering sees a renewal rate of more than 85% each year, Chris Schlosser, SVP and GM of MLS Digital said, noting that the sales cycle for 2016 is underway and the “numbers are looking very positive.”

“OTT is a very important area for us,” Schlosser said. “We deliver a very targeted millennial audience.”

Heading into the new season, which kicks off March 6, will cost $79.99 per year or $16.99 per month. MLS LIVE streams out seven local games per week (MLS also offers three  national broadcasts per week via ESPN, Univision and Fox that are blacked out on MLS LIVE). About half of the MLS clubs do allow in-market streaming (here’s how the blackout policies for the 2016 season stack up on a club-by-club basis in the U.S. and Canada). All blacked out games do become available to MLS LIVE subs 48 hours after the match.

Additionally, MLS LIVE features an archive of  games from the past six seasons, instant replays during live games, and access to condensed, 15-minute versions of games following live matches. The Web-based version of MLS LIVE also supports a multi-game feature.

This year, the OTT service will tack on some enhancements, including closer integration with MLSsoccer.com via a single sign-on and a cleaner, redesigned interface for the Web and mobile apps.

Last season, about 40% of MLS LIVE subs watched on PCs, and the same percentage watched on smartphones and tablets (Android and iOS), while the remaining 20% watched on TV-connected platforms  such as Roku players, Apple TV boxes, and via the Chromecast streaming adapter.

NeuLion’s role is to manage and package the live feeds into different formats and deliver them in a range of bit rates and resolutions for the variety of devices supported by MLS LIVE.

To enable the service to scale and optimize streaming performance, NeuLion uses multiple content delivery network partners (Akamai, Limelight Networks and Level 3 Communications) and has the ability to switch those paths based on how they are handling the load, explained Chris Wagner, NeuLion’s executive vice president, marketplace strategy.