Today marks the launch of Apple’s heavy-duty Major League Soccer integration in the company’s TV app. For either a monthly or annual fee, users in 100 countries can watch live or recorded video of all MLS and League Cup matches without regional or timed blackouts.
The service is available on any device that runs Apple’s TV app, from Apple’s Macs, iPads, and iPhones to smart TVs, streaming boxes, or other companies’ game consoles. It’s priced at $14.99 per month or $99 per season, but existing Apple TV+ subscribers can pay $12.99 per month or $79 per season instead.
The MLS season hasn’t started yet—things kick off February 25—but until then, the app will offer videos from past games so subscribers can catch up, including a few that are free even if you don’t subscribe.
On one hand, the appeal of this new service seems a bit niche. North American soccer has been growing rapidly, but it’s still not as popular as other major sports leagues. That said, this kind of total, blackout-free access is a departure from what has been typical for sports streaming services. They typically have exceedingly complex content-gating schemes based on location, time, and other factors.
To that point, other tech companies like Amazon have been making plans to air games by major sports leagues, but they’re often saddled by these same recurring limitations.
Apple seems to have struck this deal with MLS partly to illustrate its vision for what sports streaming can and perhaps should be. While the NFL’s content is tangled in an absurdly complicated web of legal arrangements and business interests, this MLS service imagines what life would be like if watching sports over IP were straightforward.
In the years before his health decline and death, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs had privately and publicly focused on the TV business as one that needed a radical reinvention for the digital era. The initial version of the Apple TV 4K (and the TV app, which would later appear on other devices) was the result of years on Apple’s part of wrangling with the legal and market complexities of TV to try to find something that was a bit less maddening than what cable TV was doing at the time.
That was largely a failure, as entrenched interests would not cede enough ground for Apple to achieve its goals—understandably. Why would TV networks and production companies cede money and control of their content, as well as lucrative regional agreements, so Apple could wrestle its way onto their turf? Other industries had already lost too big a piece of the pie to companies like Apple, Google, or Amazon, after all.
There was just enough there for users to get what Apple was envisioning, though. Niche as it may be, the MLS service seems like an extension of that still-nascent concept. It’s not the first time Apple has offered sports via the TV app, but it marks the most robust effort to bring third-party content to a prominent place inside the app alongside Apple’s original content on the TV+ service.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1913866