Eddy Cue, senior vice president of internet software and services at Apple Inc., arrives for a morning session of the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., on Wednesday, July 11, 2018.
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Apple services chief Eddy Cue said the iPhone maker would like to buy more sports rights, but the company would need to be able to do something “unique and special” with the broadcast.
“We don’t have to do sports the way that they are. There’s plenty of people doing that,” Cue told CNBC’s Alex Sherman at the Autosport Business Exchange NYC.
Apple TV, the company’s streaming service, currently airs Major League Baseball games on Friday nights and has a package for Major League Soccer that allows subscribers to watch all MLS matches.
But Apple hasn’t secured rights to major American sports such as the National Football League, which sold its NFL Sunday Ticket package to Google’s YouTube, or the National Basketball Association, which has some games appear on Amazon Prime.
Apple Original Films released a licensed movie called “F1” this summer that made over $550 million at the box office. Cue declined to say if Apple had acquired broadcast rights to the F1 racing league.
Cue, who is the senior vice president of services at Apple, said that there were a lot of things about sports broadcasts that he would like to fix, including blackouts, the need to subscribe to multiple services and issues with viewers accessing streams while traveling.
He said that the way that Apple TV broadcasts MLS, in which viewers aren’t blacked out and can stream games around the world, “fixed” some of those issues.
“If we want people to watch games, and we want all of sports to grow, some of these things need to be fixed,” Cue said, suggesting that leagues could demand all of its broadcast partners work together to enable features like picture-in-picture when multiple games are playing at the same time but on different streaming services.
When Apple broadcasts sports, the company is looking to create a “level of differentiation” from most broadcasts, said Cue, noting some of the things that Apple TV does with its MLB broadcasts.
He said that Apple TV has better video quality than other broadcasters because it doesn’t compress its video. He also cited a recent MLB broadcast in which Apple placed an iPhone on a foul pole for an unusual camera angle during the game.
Ultimately, Apple would like to do deals with leagues to broadcast their games across international markets, rather than secure packages for individual games, as the company does now with MLB. Cue said that Friday Night Baseball, which debuted in 2022, was a “test” for Apple to figure out what it was getting into.
“You had to start somewhere to learn a little bit about what it takes to broadcast before you decide to take on a whole league and broadcast worldwide,” Cue said.
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