Apple TV+ is the exclusive home of Friday night baseball.
Apple
Announced to much fanfare at Apple’s annual spring event last month, the company’s first foray into live sports programming on its streaming video service, dubbed Friday night baseball, premiered last Friday night. Apple’s deal with Major League Baseball makes Apple TV+ the exclusive home of two MLB games each week during the season. The slate started with a double-header from a Mets-Washington DC Nationals game, followed by the Astros and Anaheim Angels.
Apple shared details via a press release last week about the production of the games, including the diversity of the streaming teams. Most notably, Baltimore Orioles announcer Melanie Newman became the second woman to handle play-by-play duties for a nationally televised game when she called the Mets-Nationals. Additionally, Lauren Gardner, a frequent face on the MLB Network (and the NHL Network), hosts the pre- and post-game shows for Friday night baseball. In addition to games, daily recaps, and other seasonal content, the TV app offers a wealth of baseball-focused content in the Sports section, including classic MLB-backed shows like this week in baseball Yes world series movies.
As a baseball fan since childhood, it was exciting, not to mention journalistically relevant, for me to tune into. Friday night baseball. I turned on the game early, the NL East game between the Mets and Nationals, very curious about the accessibility of the show. Although esoteric for most casual viewers, the reality is that the technical aspects of the television presentation of any sporting event are an important consideration for people who are blind or partially sighted. It makes a lot of sense: a TV is nothing more than a giant screen on which you consume content, and like an iPhone, iPad, iMac or even an Apple Watch, the “user interface” is important. . Text matters. Colors matter. Contrast matters. What fun is it to watch a baseball game if you can’t see the score or what inning it is or how many outs or how many runners there are? For those with a typical view (or close to it), they may not think twice. On the other hand, those with visual impairments may find evaluating graphics packages equally essential to the nerd-like experience. I’m definitely in that demographic, so I paid close attention to how Apple and MLB decided to literally present Friday night baseball while star pitcher Max Scherzer made his high-profile debut in a Mets uniform.
First impressions were generally positive after a match.
Although MLB Network produces games in partnership with Apple, one immediately notices who gets the biggest billing in this joint venture. Everything from the studio to the flags on the microphones uses Apple’s San Francisco font. Originally created for watchOS, it’s a beautiful typeface that Apple stands out for in its precision. What makes it so appealing from an accessibility perspective is its readability and clarity. Even at smaller sizes, text and numbers are crisp and clear; I found he had no trouble reading the score or how many outs there were or who was at the plate, for example. San Francisco is perfectly legible, namely that it is extremely difficult to confuse a “5” with an “S”, which can be more difficult to distinguish with other fonts.
In keeping with the text itself is the contrast. For the main information box, Apple opted for a very branded style (for TV+) of white text on a black background. As one would expect, the contrast here is impeccable and lends itself well to the aforementioned readability factor. Apple has chosen similar layouts for other overlays, including current paste and all relevant stat calls. They also work very well, with a hidden warning in the lower right corner of the screen.
In a move that should tickle statistics professors around the world, Apple has dedicated said right corner to what the company describes as “innovative new predictions based on the probability of different situational outcomes” to show fans the probability that a man drives in a race. or make a good touch or whatever. One wonders if seeing these percentages is really meaningful given the small sample sizes; Still, it’s a nice informative touch on what Apple and MLB can do to better engage audiences, software-wise. Specifically, however, these probability overlays are decidedly less visually accessible than the rest of the graphs. Contrast is lower because the information simply overlaps the field, so white text tends to blend into the background. Its small size doesn’t help either. There have been review on twitter on displaying such metadata to begin with, but if Apple and MLB insist on it, then the design can be improved. Frame ancillary news the same way as main news, the same way CBS displays the current standings when covering the Masters golf. Or maybe use a heavier font weight to compensate for transparency and increase readability. It would also help if the baserunner gauge was a bit larger; FOX’s baseball graphics are particularly good in this regard.
On the plus side, deaf and hard of hearing people have access to captions for the announce team in a nice big font. Spatial audio is supported, as are a plethora of high resolution cameras. (No official word on 4K broadcasts yet, but a reasonable guess would be that it’s in the pipeline for later in the season.) Question marks include whether Apple plans to support proper audio descriptions for games, as well as other accessibility improvements for the blind. and the low vision community outside of the recommendations made in this story.
As these reviews illustrate, not everyone who watches television can see well. Also, CODA it’s subtitled because, of course, not everyone speaks ASL; subtitles exist for, that is, for accessibility reasons!
Generally speaking, choosing nits like these is important because, again, a TV is another screen that tech companies need to integrate if they want to use their war chests to invest in rolling out their own services. streaming. On Apple’s part, these are very early (pun fully intentional) entries for Friday night baseball. Speaking of them, the production value is slick, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. This is an opportunity for Apple to not only dive into live sports streaming, but to apply its own sensibility to make this new product as accessible as possible to all baseball fans, including people with disabilities.
This week Friday night baseball has the Tampa Bay Rays taking on the White Sox on south side Chicago early in the game, while the night cut has the Cincinnati Reds taking on the Dodgers in Los Angeles.
