Apple ready to spend billions on live sports streaming

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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Tech company’s Apple TV+ OTT platform has 20m paying subscribers and 45 million viewers.

NY Post recently reported that Apple had been in talks over streaming MLB weekday games.

Tech giant looking for similar deal to Amazon’s Thursday night NFL coverage

Apple TV+ generated US$80 billion in revenue in 2021.

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Technology giant Apple is reportedly ‘ready to spend billions’ on live sports content deals over the next four years, according to analysis by investment firm Wedbush.

In a new investor note seen by the MacRumours website, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said: ‘With Apple spending US$7 billion annually on original content and having roughly US$200 billion of cash on its balance sheet, we believe the company is gearing up to bid on a number of upcoming sports packages coming up for contract/renewals in future years.’

Since its initial launch in 2019, Apple TV+ has garnered around 20 million paying subscribers and 45 million viewers. The streaming platform generated US$80 billion in revenue over the last fiscal year.

Apple and MLB hold ‘substantial talks’ over broadcast deal

Despite these promising figures, Apple is yet to move into live sports streaming, with Ives seeing the company’s lack of its own in-house studio as a sign that it will look to land rights deals in the near future to build out its content offering.

Ives added that over the next four years, Apple could bid for a host of sports contracts, including the National Football League’s (NFL) Sunday Ticket out-of-market package, as well as live rights for National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) conferences including the Big Ten, Pac-12, Big East and Big 12.

Recently, the New York Post reported that Apple has been involved in ‘substantial talks’ with Major League Baseball (MLB) over airing regular season weekday games during the 2022 season, in a similar move to Amazon’s NFL deal for Thursday night games.