Does baseball touch one without moving the other? This is not the case elsewhere in the world, where gambling is a national sport! And it is through baseball that Apple TV+ is embarking on a new adventure with the broadcast, every Friday, of the “Friday Night Baseball” program: the live broadcast of two Major American League Baseball (MLB) games.
Apple TV+ propose to from ” national interest matches »: Fans will be able to free themselves from local broadcasting restrictions, which is one of the big headaches when you are a fan of a team but far from your city. MLB television rights are a masterpiece of complexity compared to which French football rights are a nice joke…
And it doesn’t stop there. In the United States, the service will also broadcast “MLB Big Inning”, a live program dedicated to baseball during the regular season, every day of the week. In the United States and Canada, it’s downright an entire channel dedicated to the sport that will offer 24/7 replays of regular season games and anthology games, as well as MLB news and analysis!
These programs will therefore be offered in the United States and Canada, but also in Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Puerto Rico, South Korea and Japan, as well as in the United Kingdom. The offer, accessible without the need to take out a subscription (for a limited time), will be extended to other countries soon.
So of course, we may not like baseball, but this first step in the live broadcast of a championship marks a significant change for Apple TV+. Until now, the service broadcast programs on demand, like Netflix. But now, the model is that of Prime Video, where you can enjoy football as in the United Kingdom and France since last summer.
Prime Video: Amazon launches its “Ligue 1 Pass” with a 10-day free trial
This first opening to baseball calls for others, and for other sports. Apple has more than enough to pay for the broadcasting rights of just about every league in the world. The rumor thus evoked the interest of the manufacturer for American football, but also university basketball in the United States.
And to think that in 2019, Eddy Cue, the big boss of content, said hand on heart that Apple was not interested in sports rights! Only fools don’t change their minds after all. Last November, Tim Cook had sown a small pebble during an interview on France 5 : when asked about Apple’s interest in sports rights, he had simply replied ” we talk about it from time to time “. And for Europe? Apple feeds an American-American tropism, but who knows…
