Apple wants "to own a sport end to end"

Apple owns MLS broadcasting “end to end.”

Apple SVP Eddy Cue was the guest on this week’s episode of The Town (Apple Podcasts, Overcast) with Matt Belloni. The whole interview, which is focused on Apple’s TV and film ambitions, is worth your time, but I want to focus on what Cue responded when Belloni¹ asked him about sports rights:

MLS is closer to what we wanted to do, which is we’d like to own a sport end to end, so that we can offer customers what we do today, which is you don’t have to worry about blackouts, you don’t worry about how to watch, we can do picture-in-picture, we can do all kinds of things that every sports fan wants. I know what I want when I’m watching all these other sports.

Taking little rights here and there across all these different sports just doesn’t deliver that. And so that’s not an area that we’ve been interested in…. I can tell you, we are not, we have not been in the bidding process to take chunks of sports.

Again, I don’t know what Apple’s working on with Formula 1, but Cue’s statement makes it clear that Apple’s ambition, for any sport, is to own the whole thing. ²

Not only does this make me think that Apple’s F1 rights will include everything currently provided by both ESPN and the F1 TV streaming product, but it makes me think that this is a testing ground for Apple to perfect its coverage of F1 in the United States and then begin buying up rights to the sport in additional countries around the world, with the possibility that eventually it’ll own F1 everywhere.

That’s an enormous long-term goal for an extremely popular international sport, but Apple certainly has the money and the ambition to try to make it happen.