With Iger being on the Apple board of directors and recently purchasing a chunk of AAPL stock for himself, it's quite possible that he'll do whatever he can to help Apple get access to ESPN/Disney/ABC content.
Probably not going to happen but to entertain a wild speculative guess, he could finesse an AAPL buyout of Disney/ESPN/ABC too if the partnership is successful from their business viewpoints.
Lots of family-friendly products too, which is something that is always key for both companies.
The time is now. Consumers are increasingly not seeing the value in cable TV any more, where is that $100+/month going to go? Apple, Amazon, Netflix? Apple has the closest thing to a real TV app platform, and lots of developers behind it too. The content is the missing piece.
Possibly an indicator of how this will go: watch what the newspaper/mag/book publishers do with a new retina iPad. Do they finally embrace? Do they stop putting out glorified PDFs of their print products and calling them digital magazines? Was Apple able to partner with anyone for the iPad3 launch? 5 years from now it's going to be an expensive luxury to get a printed newspaper or magazine delivered to your house. Everyone is ready for this EXCEPT the content producers!