Apple and MLS to present all MLS matches for 10 years, beginning in 2023
apple.com
apple.com
Which is exactly why blackouts exist. Live tv is pretty much solely about sports and 24 hour news channels now. The big four sports leagues all make billions a year off their TV deals. Giving up blackouts would absolutely hamstring them.
Hard to believe the other leagues will give up blackouts until they are confident they can run their own streaming service and cash in on that micro gambling revenue. Can you imagine how much money the NFL would make if people were gambling $.10-1 on every play?
"In most cases, the blackout results when a sports league prohibits an event from being televised locally if the event did not sell out all its tickets."
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/sports-blackouts#:~:tex....)
Leagues retain out-of-market broadcast rights and serve those to out of market users through their streaming platforms like MLB.tv and NBA League Pass.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/01/red-sox-broadcaster-to-offer...
Edit: Here is a blackout map to see what teams are blacked out where: https://library.sportingnews.com/2021-08/mlb-blackout-map-em...
Also, the marketing at MLB used to be really bad a few years ago -- it seemed to be deliberately targeting home team fans and leaving out the fact that they would not be able to watch their home team.
[1] https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/sports/baseball/2021...
"Currently, six MLB teams are blacked out all across Iowa: the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago White Sox, Minnesota Twins, Kansas City Royals and Milwaukee Brewers. Those teams are not available to watch with an MLB.tv subscription or when they are often aired on national broadcasts. Some of those clubs are not available on Iowa’s main cable packages either."
"Additionally, some parts of Iowa are more than 500 miles from several of those blacked-out MLB teams."
The way NHL.tv used to work, the blackout check would be done when you opened the stream. So you could connect to a VPN in, say, Germany, start the stream, then disconnect the VPN and after a brief interruption the playback would continue. If you did the VPN connection from your router you could stream from any device, too.
Funny thing, the ads always seemed to know exactly what market you were in.
The blackout MLS rules are really dumb. For example, I het my normal TV through DirecTV stream. My local MLS club (FC Cincinnati) airs their local broadcast on a local over the air channel. This channel is also on my DirecTV subscription.
However, because I get my “TV” streamed over the internet and not through a satellite dish or cable, all local MLS games were blacked out for me. I pay for local TV access, but even when the game was broadcast over the air, I would get blacked out because of how I got the TV access.
This was just dumb.
I specifically got a network OTA tuner just for this purpose, but getting rid of blackout rules entirely would be fantastic.
Wow missed that - very big deal
I have the MLB package and blackouts drive me nuts - I’m not even in the Bay Area, but close enough to not be able to watch Giants or A’s home games,
Than it’s already starting to fragment: some Friday games on AppleTV, some weekend games on Peacock
And MLB.tv doesn’t carry playoff games
MLB has consolidated a lot of the teams’ media properties under its umbrella
A long time ago they restricted radio stations from distributing baseball games online for example
But they double-dip on TV:
- Allow blackouts to increase revenue from local TV - Sell MLB.TV
Do they still do blackouts if the game sells out? I'm not a sports fan, but I thought games would only get blacked out if they didn't sell enough in-person tickets.
But my experience pretty much mirrors yours. Any time I might be interested in seeing a game, it's been blacked out on TV. So I never bothered to watch anything else. Why would I give a shit about a team not even near me if I'm not a huge fan to begin with?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_tel...
The kind of blackouts you describe is still common in U.K. to encourage you to go and support the local team rather than the big regional team because that is on TV. Think Wigan Athletic or Bolton Wanderers instead of Manchester United
English football has 11-21 tiers and strong grassroots. Those blackouts are not designed for big teams to sell tickets they will anyway sell out, but to help the smaller teams which are rarely featured on TV, not in the top premier league but play instead in Championship, league 1,2, or non conference leagues etc.
ESPN, MLS' current partner, is mediocre at best.
Now if only the PHL Union can replace JP Dellecamera. Somehow he manages to make The Beautiful Game sound ugly.
The game-changer for them, IMO, is to buy the rights to broadcast Pac-12 and Big-10 football (and ideally all sports).
I am an avid college football fan. Trying to find games to watch is a pain without some sort of lame ass subscription somewhere. I already pay for Apple TV + because it's bundled with other services that I use.
With the incoming threat of ESPN + Disney + SEC fracturing the college football landscape, Apple could provide the money, reach, and power to take some of the sport (and country's) biggest brands and put them front and center in front of millions and basically compete head-on with Disney. Next step is you broadcast all of the NCAA sports - baseball and volleyball championships, etc. Take what the Big-10 and Pac-12 channels were supposed to be and make them great and unbundled from cable TV.
In the coming years I think they're going to add live news with a focus on "quality journalism" as well. The Jon Stewart show and documentaries they are producing are the first drip.
Not so fast my friend! :p
The Big Ten in particular is a peer with the SEC in football viewership and revenue, but dwarfs the SEC in overall academic revenue and power. Texas and Oklahoma’s move to the SEC is a big deal, but these seismic shifts cause other seismic shifts and conferences such as the PAC-12 will look to form deeper relationships with the Big Ten so that they are not at a permanent disadvantage. The Big Ten itself continues to eye schools such as Duke, North Carolina, Virginia, and Virginia Tech as potential new members. This isn’t the end of the story there.
In addition, money from a company such as Apple gives them a significant bulwark against the SEC dictating how football goes. You may recall the Big Ten, ACC, and PAC-12 formed a scheduling “alliance” in response to Texas and Oklahoma moving to the SEC. It may end up being a pony show, but the intent is there. Apple perhaps purchasing the rights to stream the games may not necessarily preclude local broadcasts either. Otherwise you’d make the exact same argument about ESPN and the SEC. But SEC games are routinely broadcast on other networks.
Now, that’s not to say with recent NIL deals and Texas and Oklahoma moving to the SEC that something seismic won’t occur. But I think what is more likely to happen is a separate league separate from any conference in football only which would include top tier brand name programs, versus a world where the SEC and ESPN dictates how things go. I do think ESPN’s likely long-term goal is to break off the marquee SEC programs (Alabama, LSU, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, etc.) alongside the marquee other conference programs (Ohio State, Notre Dame, Michigan, Penn St, Oregon, USC, etc.) and form a league, but so long as the other conferences don’t care for it, the risk of losing billions in academic funding (which makes football revenue look like a lemonade stand) will keep this from happening.
All they care about is the money. And Apple is one of the few companies that can write a check with enough zeros to make it happen.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/03/apple-and-mlb-announc...
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-tv-plus-could-become-ho...
From this perspective, something like Sunday Ticket makes a lot of sense even with the hefty price tag, so long as they’re allowed to parcel out those games as they’d like.
I mean, there must be a lot of people at Apple thinking about the future - what it will look like, how media is consumed and then again how Apple can own that pipeline and ecosystem.
Both on the media side, hardware side and software side the offering is lacking in ways i find very strange coming from Apple.
For instance why haven't Apple just gotten the internet broadcast rights to a lot of sports to build a moat around it - not because it is popular but because they can. With Apples finances they could also get alot of popular sports on Apple TV as well.
Why didn't Apple buy any movie studios to kickstart Apple TV and get a big catalogue from the get go - seems like a no brainer.
Apple does a lot of stuff right, but there are more than a few areas where they fail to really provide value.
It is possible that they want all or nothing rights. There are a ton of complicated rules by NHL/MLB/NFL/NBA on blackout games, parceling out different games to different broadcasters in different areas, and then of course, different broadcasters by country. All with different contract expiry dates.
I will not pay for sports until the sports organizations make it easy to find everything (within their sports org) in one place.
Sports are an interesting approach for Apple, but in a way it makes sense as it is an area that has the opportunity to be disrupted. People loves sports but the consumption of sports can be a frustrating experience. Many leagues still do not have a good streaming experience and the leagues that do, such as MLB, are subject to blackout rules. If Apple can cut through the red tape to eliminate blackout rules and create a white-labeled app experience for sports leagues it might be lucrative for Apple and beneficial to the league and their fans.
As for Apple TV+, no, it's not a no-brainer. The approach they took was to sign up a lot of creative talent, instead, and make their own content. That's already been a proven success, so it's hard to say that a diametrically-opposed approach (which is kind of lame and would not even result in any new content) was a "no-brainer".
Because it's not in the interest of those sports leagues to kill off their viewing audiences. The average person who has cable has ESPN channels as part of their basic cable package. You don't even NEED cable to watch a lot of sports because terrestrial television has sports on constantly. The NFL realized a long time ago that there is a niche market for those who want a sheer firehose of content... but the vast majority will not directly pay for it. Sports fans will just find something else to occupy their time with.
A team isn't going to yank its own games off of its own channel without a very good reason.
frankly, i'm not a fan of this strategy as there's no synergy between the computing and content businesses, but apple has fallen for the relentless march to grow at all costs, and sees content as low-hanging fruit for them (again, i disagree with this assessment).
apple home, car, glasses, etc. make much more sense, but those are too slow growing for both professional and unprofessional investors alike.
MLS is going to blow up in the coming years. There is a lot of talk about US national team being very competitive in 2026 World Cup. MLS has produced stars already, like Alphonso Davies.
Once the hype gets higher and more money start being spent on soccer in the US, it will become a power house.
My perspective on the big money stars coming in is that it's a huge financial drain on the team for around 1/2-3 years of performance by the star. Yes, MLS has designated players (DPs), but last I looked, the first $500k in salary still counts towards the team's salary cap. I'm not sure what the salary cap is this year, but even if they've doubled it from the last time I paid attention, it'd only be $5M... It's a huge chunk of change relative to the rest of the team for not a lot of performance. Teams would largely be better off finding and growing youth talent than brining in another DP.
I finally gave up on my tickets after nearly 15 years because it was apparent the team wasn't interested in winning cups anymore. Ownership just wanted to fill the stadium with whatever retiring star they could get their hands on.
U.S. male Soccer is a joke*
I urge anyone curious about this topic to go and look how the US female soccer team performs globally, it truly speaks about how the US has a bad soccer team simply because all the talent is funneled elsewhere
So what? People seem to enjoy the comedy club that is US soccer. That's all that matters for Apple which is trying to serve its home country and largest market: the US.
I'm sure after some time, if this is successful, they would expand to leagues from Latin America, then finally Europe.
So what? People seem to enjoy the comedy club that is US soccer. That's all that matters for Apple which is trying to serve its home country and largest market: the US.
I'm sure after some time, if this is successful, they would expand to leagues from Latin America, then finally Europe.
that's one of the strengths of basketball (and other sports to varying degrees), both as a sport and as entertainment. games are won and lost on many samples that each count a small fraction toward the outcome. any single game's outcome can still be swayed by chance, but that's very unlikely for a series of games, upon which rankings are based.
The loyalty is to the game and the beauty that can flash no matter the league play. I sat down to watch a couple minutes of Sunday league last month, kid scored a banger off the post with good team buildup, was fun to watch if slower than watching Real Madrid/Liverpool the week before. This tiering is silly and entertainment can be found wherever you look -- hell people watch college sports religiously and the quality difference is massive from their pro equivalents.
That said, MLS grows in quality every year, exponentially over the last 5. If that growth continues and develops young players, coupled with 320million person pool of potential athletes, MLS will be awash with money to grow itself. Even if it just reaches Championship level play that's a wonderfully entertaining level of football.
Liga MX (Mexican soccer) ratings destroy them for the obvious reasons (the league the US's largest most passionate soccer fanbase is most passionate about), EPL ratings beat them pretty handily as well (English Premier League, the highest profile and probably best of the European leagues).
Given the money and momentum behind MLS though, there is at least a chance by the end of this deal that they have become one of the top soccer leagues in the world and Apple looks extremely clever, which is not something you can really say for a lot of leagues with actual better soccer than MLS has right now.
It is weird that Apple, one of the biggest companies in the world, now has a vested interest in globally promoting a specific soccer league. MLS is probably thrilled with this compared to their current situation where ESPN+ does dump pretty much all the games onto streaming as content, but is generally disinterested in promoting it too heavily because of their vast prtfolio of already more popular sports.
Most of those NWSL matches where MLS lost in viewership were also just preseason tournament matches for the women's league. The season hadn't even started yet.
Back when I was involved in coaching youth soccer I found the other coaches had never heard of the New England Revolution, New York Red Bulls, L.A. Galaxy, etc.
These folks were fans of man united but had no interest at all in US soccer.
Who knows? Maybe not having lockouts will mean that if some team starts playing well people will be able to watch it. MLS definitely needs something to happen to get people interested but it seems to me they should relegate the whole league.
They are definitely working on improving engagement - but perhaps each team is at a different level ;)
Just say “New York Fútbol Club”. See, it breathes already.
Also make way for teams that are just called “Sports Association Firebug” for historically cogent but difficult to parse at first.
There's literally "New York City Football Club" in the MLS.
Soccer will only benefit from the decline in youth American Football participation.
MLS is being fairly smart with its expansion and focusing on cities where they're not trying to pull fans away from the NY Yankees or the LA Lakers or whatever. Sure, they still have teams there as well, but the die-hard fans are going to be in the towns where folks are happy to have any team to be excited for.
In this thread we’ve learned there’s a New York Red Bulls and a New York Football Club.
This is why the NHL has spent the last few decades starting up hockey teams in the American South where there's few fans instead of say, Saskatoon, where there'd be a legion of fans. In Saskatoon it's a small market and you'd already be top dog with no growth. In Phoenix you may never reach the other leagues, but even if you can move viewership by a few percentage points, the size of the market ensures massive gains.
The US National team being competitive in international is way too high of an expection from anyone that follows international soccer. The US is stuck geographically playing Mexico all. the. damn. time. They rarely play any European teams. They also rarely play good South American teams.
Until they regularly play good teams, they will stagnate going back and forth with Mexico. The same applies to Mexico too. The only way to get better is to keep playing better teams.
And we're in the midst of a huge boom period for Americans in Europe, with young Americans playing regularly for perennial Champions League teams Dortmund, Barcelona, Chelsea, Juventus, and Leipzig, a handful of starters on quality teams behind them, and major European teams spending more and more resources scouting American prospects.
Player quality is the main driver of international success: Belgium went from 57th-ranked in 2010 to 1st-ranked in 2015 (yes, FIFA rankings are bad, but they point to something real) not because of some change in scheduling philosophy but because they had a bunch of great players in 2015.
Just look at the recent fixture list of the USMNT[0]. I'm really not meaning to offend, but these are not soccer power house types of squads they are facing.
The USMNT has a long long way to go. As long as there competition with American Throwball, basketball, baseball, etc, the US will suffer this level of mediocrity as the money potential just isn't there.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_men%27s_national...
This is the unfortunate truth, IMO. As long as football is a distant fourth or fifth in American sports priorities, I don't see a reality where it excels. Why would it, when the athletes who could probably do amazing go to the other sports where they make 20x as much at a minimum, but more likely 200x as much?
Given the current trajectory of things, I simply don't see it changing either. Without some sort of black swan event either seriously incentivizing football or disincentivizing the other sports, there is no immediate path to the traction necessary to make football popular enough in the States for the USMNT to be a world class player in the next few decades.
They are literally celebrating the fact that they are not EPL, they are not Championship, they are not League 1 and on down the line. WTF! were they thinking that self deprecation was going to work at that level???!!!! You know, when you're bored with NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, there's us little guys called MLS. No, you're not trying to buy a house, we're a real sports league. For reality not for realty!!!
The US has way more European pros now, playing on good, Champions League caliber teams. MLS has attracted higher quality talent, and the farm teams are producing better talent domestically.
The EPL matches picked up over here for TV are between top-table, expensive clubs. Watch some bottom-table matches or matches from the Championship, and I'll think you'll find the quality isn't that far off from MLS.
US soccer including MLS has come a long, long way since 2010. Look at MLS from that era compared to today—it's night and day.
But please, tell me how EPL matches work. They have lots of money with high salaries to pay the top talent in the world and attract the best coaching minds you say? I can't imagine why anyone would rather watch that /s
In any case, I'm so geeked over this deal. MLS is the only league I enjoy anymore. I dig parity and salary-capped leagues, and soccer has this suspense about it where every minute matters unlike most other sports. Great pickup for Apple.
MLS is a distant 4th or 5th sport in the North America and I don't see that ever changing. European soccer (Premier League, La Liga, Serie A) will always be the pinnacle of soccer in the world. People want to watch the best teams and best players and MLS doesn't compare to the caliber of European soccer and never will.
- Streamed over AppleTV so presumably very high quality
- No need for an AppleTV subscription
- No blackouts for local since local no longer exists
- Simulcast with linear Fox/ESPN/UDN without blackouts so no need for cable/YTTV
- Free with an MLS season ticket
This seems like the best thing ever. This seems better than the old MLSLive back in the early days of (unpirated) soccer streaming when NBC Sports Gold was free.
If they let you stream old games and don't remove them after a week or two that would be perfection.
If AppleTV brings quality to it, that could wind up being a major selling point, right now just the quality of the stream is often pretty poor and looks very second-class with MLS (and don't get me started on the twitter simulcasts with the UDN games).
Back in 2008, Google Maps had an overlay for foreclosures, so you could look at all the foreclosures in an area at once. The real estate industry hated that.
I'll bet that holds true for the vast majority of U.S. citizens who've even heard of anything called "MLS."
Side note: Long ago Major League Soccer was not the first hit for "MLS" on youtube. Now they have the vanity URL which is nice:
The wide platform availability is an absolute win. Are there any big streaming dongles / systems that aren't covered here?
Because your TV did not support HDMI CEC.
The point of this deal is that there are no blackout restrictions. Every game is on the service, regardless of where you are worldwide. If you want to watch MLS games, you subscribe to this Apple service, and whether you are in the parking lot outside the stadium or in Indonesia, the game is on it.
May as well just go back to the 1 provider model (cable/sat). At least you’ve only got 1 EPG etc to deal with.
I’ll add that this fragmentation also encourages piracy.
There’s a great business opportunity for a startup of they can strike deals with all streaming services & offer a single view/epg/site that presents all of the services you’re subscribed to in a single consistent way.
It is like that on the TV app for apple devices. You search what you want, you get the option to pay or subscribe, and you watch. The only hangup is when other content providers, like Netflix or sports organizations, choose not to allow Apple to search their content.
The blackout restrictions suck where they apply, but at the same time, as a person who doesn't live in his hometown, without satellite or streaming packages, I wouldn't be able to watch the teams I care about at all except when they visit the teams that play where I live.
The thing stopping you from watching it easily is those organizations preferring to outsource broadcasting and ad sales to other media sellers who demand exclusivity terms that make it harder for you to watch.
>A broad selection of MLS and Leagues Cup matches, including some of the biggest matchups, will also be available at no additional cost to Apple TV+ subscribers, with a limited number of matches available for free. As an added benefit to fans, access to the new MLS streaming service will be included as part of MLS full-season ticket packages.
And this is a perfect way to do it - those who want it will jump right in, those who don't know but are interested have ways of experiencing it. And the biggest fans? They get it for free since they already have season tickets.
Jobs II helped set the stage and Tim is a great execution guy.
"The people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out."
In the USA at least, there's virtually no 4K sports broadcasts of any kind (including Apple/MLB is only 1080p).
Unless they decide to can the whole effort, it’s now obvious that the sports experience via Apple TV+ is going to be part of the VR headset story.
Why couldn’t Apple stream 4k sports content?
The “around the world” part is huge for the MLS (and to a lesser extent for Apple). I’m in Europe and I’ve never watched an MLS game. But it looks like it’ll be the first and only football league that I’ll be able to watch in a civilized way so I’ll definitely give it a try.
Over here in europe you need multiple providers for the same competition since the rights are split. Champions League football (as in soccer) requires a Sky, DAZN and Amazon Prime subscription if you want to see all matches (of your favorite club). Same thing with most domestic leagues.
So the only way to watch MLS games is by subscribing to the MLS streaming service? Am I reading this right?
What do I get for my subscription during the off-season?
How do you attract new MLS fans?
Speaking to Sports Illustrated on Tuesday, MLS commissioner Don Garber emphasized that the commitment isn’t a traditional broadcast arrangement, wherein a league exchanges the rights to its games and content for a negotiated rate. Rather, MLS and Apple have entered a partnership where each is incentivized to grow the business. Garber declined to reveal the economics (MLS reportedly was seeking up to $300 million annually), but he said the league will receive a base fee along with a percentage of subscription sales. Sports Business Journal reported that Apple’s guarantee to MLS will be $250 million per year. MLS and Apple will create a production studio, hire presenters and English-, Spanish- and French-speaking announcers, develop shoulder programming and produce a live whip-around show on Saturday nights.
This might answer your question:
Although the days of club-specific, regional broadcasts will end following the 2022 season, linear networks like ESPN, Fox or Univision are still in frame to negotiate a broadcast deal. Those games will be simulcast, however, by Apple. Local blackouts also will become a relic from the past.
More details:
— The dedicated digital platform will allow MLS to schedule matches at more regular and predictable times. Garber said there are 60 different start times across the 2022 season. From next year, MLS will schedule as many games as possible on Saturday nights, with occasional mid-week games on Wednesdays.
— Standard broadcast windows will include a 30-minute pregame show and postgame content. Club radio feeds will be available in addition to league broadcasters.
— MLS full-season ticket holders will receive a complementary subscription, and select games will be available to Apple TV+ subscribers at no additional cost.
— Content will be available on the Apple TV app on all Apple devices; Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Sony, TCL, VIZIO, and other smart TVs; Amazon Fire TV and Roku devices; PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles; Chromecast with Google TV; Comcast Xfinity and on tv.apple.com.
— All broadcasts will be in 1080p.
https://www.si.com/soccer/2022/06/14/mls-apple-partner-broad...
The MLB production is crap. They really need to stop making it look like an Apple product.
There are a few things I would change (the odds gotta go, and I wouldn’t mind a more compact scorebug) but on balance I really like their choices. Give me Apple’s gfx package over Bally or TBS any day of the week.
I've wanted to use NBA league pass in the past to follow my team, and the crazy broadcast restrictions meant that on the rare occasion I had the time to watch a game, it was a shot in the dark as to whether or not I'd actually be able to. On many occasions it was very upsetting to have an evening to myself wanting to simply watch a game I felt I paid for and to find out my game wasn't actually available after all.
I understand that the sports leagues customers are really the cable channels who pay them big cash for the broadcast rights, but this kind of thing was a big part of what killed my extreme enthusiasm for pro sports.
And the AppleTV app is available on most streaming devices including the AppleTV hardware device.
I routinely get messages in my group chat that are a reaction to something that hasn't yet happened on my screen. The group chat makes for fun communal viewing, so I don't want to leave it, but these messages undermine the experience.
I watch sports OTA whenever I can and if I lived in my hometown there's no doubt I'd choose to watch my local teams on cable. Live sports moving to streaming services is an unfortunate trend.
Can use SharePlay to synchronize things.
The UI for sports is currently terrible, by and large. The best you can do - despite the fact that everyone has a computer attached to and/or in their TV these days - is stream a linear broadcast channel. With this deal, Apple can show you a dashboard of all the games currently playing so you can pick a close and/or intresting one. You could choose a different audio channel - say, crowd noise only or a mic attempting to pick up what a manager is shouting at their players. Picture and picture if a goal is scored in another game. Probably way more than all of this.
From this POV, buying content is merely the price of admission to using technology to completely change and improve the sports viewing experience. Like I said, I'm just guessing at what Apple is thinking, but it stands to reason they have some technology angle on this if they feel like they are the right people to mount an attempt at improving this experience.
I don’t, but it’s really not the most outlandish idea. It gives every season ticket holder a reason to either buy an Apple TV or, maybe more importantly, start using the Apple TV app on their existing devices.
Imagine you’re an Orlando City fan who’s happy with Hulu and never really cared to open the Apple TV app on your Samsung TV. Now that you’re using Apple TV to watch matches, though, you’ve started to come across some of those other shows you’ve heard people talk about.
Ted Lasso seems pretty cool, maybe you’ll sign up for Apple TV+ and give it a try…
Because the marginal cost for Apple is near zero, and many consumers are cheap.
“You’re telling me I have to pay $X for MLS, and now you want me to pay $5 more for this Jason Sudeikis show?? Screw that.”
This deal is 8x the 2022 MLS TV deal annually, and the current deal doesn't have anything like this. It seems insane to me to imagine MLS telling Apple "8x our current deal and you have to give it to our biggest fans for free."
Who knows, maybe that's what happened, though.
Not "Multiple Listing Service" for Real Estate.
Also interesting is this: > At launch, all MLS and Leagues Cup matches will include announcers calling the action in English and Spanish, and all matches involving Canadian teams will be available in French.
So, are they keeping the door open for additional languages in the future? Is this subscription available world-wide?
Let's be honest here: Premier league matches aren't exactly cheap to watch. If this is cost-effective and available in a lot of languages, it's an opportunity to watch some matches that are at least at a certain minimum professional level.
Just the fact that MLS includes the word soccer, rather than football explains it.
And the the blurb mentioned 29 teams!
This is not a big deal outside of soccer(ugh) fans in the northern americas