MLS makes 10-year deal with Apple TV

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Joe Hass

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Jun 14, 2022, 4:30:49 PM6/14/22
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PGage

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Jun 15, 2022, 9:52:10 AM6/15/22
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I’m not a follower of MLS, but I am interested in this model for presenting a sports league. My interest is in a couple of things:

1. Pricing: NBA League Pass is $30/Month, which is about $180 for the season. This is the premium package (no ads, two simultaneous streams per game). Standard (with ads, one stream) is half that. Both black out local games and games on national networks. The NBA is more popular than MLS, but their package is more restricted. Also, Apple just paid a ton, but even without ads they don’t have to make that all back in subscription fees. Maybe $150/year (no ads)? Are their really enough US soccer fans willing to pay substantially more?

2. Coverage. For the most part, I don’t like the fractured coverage of MLB and NBA. I would rather TNT do all NBA games and ESPN do all MLB. I liked the days when one network did all NFL/NFC games and the other all AFL/AFC. Deals like Apple could bring that back.

4. “Journalistic” integrity. ESPN has always had this fiction of a wall separating their sports journalism from their sports partnerships. It is 75% BS, as is similar claims at other broadcast and cable networks. But not 100%. There is some sense in which the credibility of the sports department at each network provides some kind of brake on the most egregious dishonest hyping of the sports leagues the network is in partnership with. But will that be true at Apple? HBO used to present tennis, and still does boxing (though the latter may be more an illustration of the problem). If there are drug, sexual assault, financial, other scandals at MLS, how will Apple investigate, or even communicate, it? Would they even feel an obligation to pretend they were reporting on that, without a separate in house spirts department whose reputation they care about? Will Apple become the Fox News of MLS, functioning as a PR and propaganda arm, and nothing else?

On Tue, 14 Jun 2022 at 1:30 PM Joe Hass <hassg...@gmail.com> wrote:
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Brad Beam

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Jun 15, 2022, 10:01:17 AM6/15/22
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Don’t forget, there’s only 34 regular-season matches in MLS (Mar-Oct), vs 82 in the NBA. Parts of eight months, with fewer matches….

And as an auditor, I have to ask - where’s #3?

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 15, 2022, at 09:52, PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:



Mark Jeffries

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Jun 15, 2022, 10:16:02 AM6/15/22
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HBO got out of boxing a few years ago for what you cited.  Showtime's still in the boxing biz (I don't know who produces it for them) and "Inside the NFL" moved to them and is produced by CBS Sports (although the drawing card is still the NFL Films-produced highlights).  It seems to me that SHO was briefly in the MMA biz as well.

Mark Jeffries
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Adam Bowie

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Jun 15, 2022, 10:44:19 AM6/15/22
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On Wed, Jun 15, 2022 at 2:52 PM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:
I’m not a follower of MLS, but I am interested in this model for presenting a sports league. My interest is in a couple of things:

1. Pricing: NBA League Pass is $30/Month, which is about $180 for the season. This is the premium package (no ads, two simultaneous streams per game). Standard (with ads, one stream) is half that. Both black out local games and games on national networks. The NBA is more popular than MLS, but their package is more restricted. Also, Apple just paid a ton, but even without ads they don’t have to make that all back in subscription fees. Maybe $150/year (no ads)? Are their really enough US soccer fans willing to pay substantially more?


The deal seems to work out at $250m a year for 476 regular season games, plus play-offs, plus Leagues Cup games, plus some other games. So under $500,000 per game which suddenly makes it feel a bit cheaper. That said, many games will take place simultaneously, so a dedicated viewer can't really watch every game - at least not live.

The question will be how much Apple up-charges for these games. 

My suspicion is that while the numbers might not be massive in the scheme of things, this will help Apple reach some audiences that they're probably under-represented with in terms of their existing subscriber base.

 
2. Coverage. For the most part, I don’t like the fractured coverage of MLB and NBA. I would rather TNT do all NBA games and ESPN do all MLB. I liked the days when one network did all NFL/NFC games and the other all AFL/AFC. Deals like Apple could bring that back.

I think that's wishful thinking :-)

MLS can do this because they probably didn't have a lot of others clammering at the door for the rights in this way. For the most part, leagues have worked out that dividing their rights up into packages generates them more revenue than selling them in their entirety to one provider. The NFL is the exemplar of this selling games to all the major networks, ESPN and Amazon, and also having the Sunday Ticket package, and Red Zone, and whatever they offer in app, and and and... 

If they reckoned they could get more from a single vendor then they might well do that. (Obviously NFL deals are looonnnngggg so it'll be a while before we see if this is the case). 

[As an aside, a new deal has just been done for Indian Premier League cricket rights, and they've just split broadcast TV and digital streaming rights into separate packages. Each was as valuable as the other, and the total deal is about $6bn for three years - far fewer fixtures too since the IPL runs across two months. The BCCI who run IPL took a leaf out of US leagues' books and introduced a third package of good games that the Viacom18 (the winning streaming company) also bought to ensure they had exclusivity for streaming. Hotstar, owned by Disney got the TV-only deal, which could massively impact Disney's "Disney+" streaming numbers when everything pans out, since Indian cricket fans contributed 50m or 36% of their subscriber base. ]

Also, leagues do think about their visibility. If you go exclusively on a single platform, you might well be out of sight and therefore out of mind for a lot of "average" fans who aren't quite as dedicated. I believe the MLS deal leaves room for some non-exclusive games in places like Fox, ESPN and Univision , although no deal has yet been announced. I would think that for a relatively young league, they'd want the kind of exposure those channels would give them. Going Apple exclusive probably doesn't help continue the league's growth.

This is a US only deal. MLS is shown across a couple of channels here in the UK, but it's fair to say that it's not remotely as interesting to European soccer fans as EPL, La Liga, Serie A etc. 
 

4. “Journalistic” integrity. ESPN has always had this fiction of a wall separating their sports journalism from their sports partnerships. It is 75% BS, as is similar claims at other broadcast and cable networks. But not 100%. There is some sense in which the credibility of the sports department at each network provides some kind of brake on the most egregious dishonest hyping of the sports leagues the network is in partnership with. But will that be true at Apple? HBO used to present tennis, and still does boxing (though the latter may be more an illustration of the problem). If there are drug, sexual assault, financial, other scandals at MLS, how will Apple investigate, or even communicate, it? Would they even feel an obligation to pretend they were reporting on that, without a separate in house spirts department whose reputation they care about? Will Apple become the Fox News of MLS, functioning as a PR and propaganda arm, and nothing else?


I think that ship has long sailed. I don't think anyone really does truly "independent" journalism about the leagues they cover. Maybe in the news divisions, but the idea that a sports network that pays billions of dollars for the rights to a league would also produce anything too contrarian doesn't feel likely. I'd love to be proved wrong on this.

With this Apple deal, I can easily see them doing some of those behind-the-scenes docu-series that we see on Amazon and Netflix. But I never believe that they're editorially independent no matter what the makers claim. 



Adam

 

PGage

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Jun 15, 2022, 11:09:51 AM6/15/22
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The 3 is silent…

Tom Wolper

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Jun 15, 2022, 12:53:16 PM6/15/22
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Here’s a Sports Illustrated story about the deal where the MLS commissioner says it isn’t a traditional rights deal. He describes it as more of a partnership where each side is working to build up the other. The story also mentions that there can be a separate deal for broadcast rights for select games.

Just as MLS is available in Europe but not as popular as European leagues, the Premier League is available on NBC and Peacock, and some Championship games as well as the Bundesliga and La Liga are available on ESPN+. A soccer fan can have plenty to watch without paying for the MLS package.


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Kevin M.

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Jun 15, 2022, 12:57:16 PM6/15/22
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“A modest proposal… make the nets bigger.” - Aaron Sorkin

On Tue, Jun 14, 2022 at 1:30 PM Joe Hass <hassg...@gmail.com> wrote:
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