Apple has long practiced a level of company secrecy, especially around product announcements, that’s uniquely stringent even in corporate tech circles. Which makes all the more intriguing the potential announcements at next Monday’s opening session of the company’s World Wide Developers Conference, often a bully platform for announcing its paradigm-shifting products to the people building software for them.
No, we probably won’t see the company’s long-in-development augmented-reality/virtual-reality headset or the related realityOS operating system for it, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has a long history of accurately reading Apple tea leaves. Maybe there’ll be a new version of the MacBook Air laptop with a next-generation M2 processor.
Also read: Apple May Bundle NFL Plus with NFL Sunday Ticket
But the truly intriguing possibility has more to do with what Apple may announce, at WWDC or soon thereafter, with its streaming service, Apple TV Plus, and the NFL.
Apple remains, by most recent reporting, the most likely future home for the NFL Sunday Ticket package of out-of-market games that limping satcaster DirecTV is giving up after this season, though Amazon is reportedly still very much in the hunt.
At the same time, the NFL is building its own streaming service, NFL Plus, which Sports Business Journal reported recently is expected to launch in July.
As with the Sunday Ticket package, Apple and Amazon are the leading contenders to acquire rights to the service, which would feature live games on mobile phones and tablets, for $5 a month, plus whatever shoulder content such as radio, podcasts and team-created content are added in.
Unlike Sunday Ticket, NFL Plus would only show the games someone could see in their home market. Previously, the material was available in a now-elapsed package with Yahoo and major wireless carriers.
Perhaps more importantly, the league is considering selling a stake in NFL Media, where, again, Amazon and Apple are prime contenders. Both have the fat wallets and vast ambitions to do the deal, but I’m thinking the NFL may prefer to do a deal with Apple more than Amazon, if other deal points are relatively equal.
Should Amazon pick up those two bits of NFL business, it would be easily the league’s most important partner. Amazon already is spending $1 billion annually for the next 11 years on Thursday night games.
But all of that together would give Amazon outsized say over the league’s media future, while shutting out another rich and eager new partner just as all of the NFL’s older broadcast and cable distributors have seen audiences erode amid cord-cutting.
Too much concentration is bad business, something the league is seldom accused of being about. Historically, the NFL has preferred to spread its media relationships around, much like the Defense Department with military contracts in every Congressional district, to ensure it always has competitive bids and political support for its valuable content, the most-watched programming on television.
And Apple could definitely bring a lot to this team.
It starts with an installed base of 1.8 billion devices, including hundreds of millions of iPhones, which make Apple the world’s most lucrative handset and tablet maker.
The company is learning the ins and outs of streaming live sports, and targeted video advertising, with its Friday Night Baseball deal. Apple has declined so far to specify how many subscribers it has for Apple TV Plus, the service is on a roll in terms of quality programming, with lots more to come.
Apple is expected to bump up content spending next year to more than $12 billion, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. That’s close to double the current level of $6 billion to $7 billion, and starts to create headaches for competitors trying to keep up in a tighter market.
The NFL games (and tens of millions of viewers) would fit nicely next to the upcoming Martin Scorsese project, Killers of the Flower Moon, and whatever blockbuster content arrives by way of a deal with David Ellison’s Skydance Media (Top Gun: Maverick, multiple Mission: Impossible, Terminator, and Jack Reacher entries).
The NFL has been moving aggressively into new platforms for a while. It announced a developer contest last year with game platform Skillz to create NFL-branded football-connected mobile apps. Several finalists announced this March are headed to a bakeoff with a potential August launch ahead of the season. Winners will get a coveted league endorsement, branding and marketing support.
And though Apple CEO Tim Cook has been even more secretive than usual when it comes to those Apple TV Plus subscriber counts (or indeed, the service’s basic strategy), an NFL partnership might arrive at a particularly propitious time for Apple.
Over the past eight months, TV Plus projects have won a Best Comedy Emmy for Ted Lasso and a Best Picture Oscar for Coda.
As this year’s Emmy FYC season kicks into high gear, newer shows Pachinko, from Korean-born auteur Kogonada, and Severance, produced and directed by Ben Stiller among others, are almost certainly in the mix. Schlub spy series Slow Horses, with Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, is also getting some critical love.
The recent awards attention is an impressive validation of Apple TV Plus’ go-slow originals-only approach, which early on left its offerings woefully meager. At one point last year, I wrote that the bare cupboard made TV Plus look more like more like a corporate hobby than a truly competitive streaming service.
Indeed, Apple seemed to agree. Even with TV Plus’ dirt-cheap price ($5.99 a month, or part of Apple’s various services bundles), Apple gave away subscriptions to just about anybody who would take one during TV Plus’ first 20 months or so of existence.
Also read: Apple Makes History with Friday Night Baseball Debut
Now, it looks ready to spend as needed, part of Cook’s broader efforts to drive company growth through an ever beefier Services division, which generated $68 billion in fiscal year 2021. That was up a whopping 27 percent in a year. It’s also three times the market capitalizations of Paramount Global, which owns longtime NFL broadcaster CBS.
The NFL, meanwhile, remains the biggest show on American television, however you define “TV.” How else to explain Fox’s $375 million announcer contract (the network has pushed back on the number, but whatever it is, it’s a lot) for still-not-retired quarterback Tom Brady and CBS’ $180 million/10-year deal with the already-retired Tony Romo? Just talking about the game is big business, because the game is massive business.
Apple would need to figure out issues such as its own announcing teams, and likely further build out its advertising infrastructure. But it would have the Friday Night Baseball learnings, a year to get ready for Sunday Ticket, and the stake in NFL Media for master classes. If that all came together Apple would have bought into one of the world’s most successful TV production companies, which masquerades as a sports league. That would be a formidable new team indeed in the streaming wars. ■
