Apple excludes bid for Premier League Football due to worldwide rights

Apple Service Head q eddy has effectively rejected the company’s reported bid to acquire the broadcasting rights for the English Premier League Apple TV+,

Apple is reportedly interested in acquiring the rights to broadcast the Premier League early 2012, earlier this year, Bloomberg insisted on apple consider a bid ‌For the rights to stream the Premier League, as well as other lower-tier English Football League fixtures, to Apple TV+.

‌Eddy Cue has now effectively rejected Apple’s intention to bid on the grounds that it will not be able to obtain worldwide rights. The company sought an agreement similar to its rights to broadcast Major League Soccer (MLS) worldwide for a ten-year period, viewing the arrangement as a “historic first for a major professional sports league”. speak against daily mailCue explained Apple’s reasoning:

I don’t like the word uniqueness because it is important, but not that important. Global rights are important to us. We’re a global company, we have customers in every country in the world, a huge number of customers, and it’s not exciting to me to have something that you should have but you don’t have.

Second, we’ve put a significant amount of technical resources into the product. We think we’re going to do some pretty innovative things with the product as we go forward. We’ve done some things like MLS 360 (providing a live preview of each game), we’ve seen a number of games, which again is very difficult in other environments. And it’s nothing.

I can’t justify throwing a small subset of the product at people who I think are the best engineers in the world. This is the kind of partnership it should be because the scale of our investment is important. It doesn’t mean “Hey, I have time from 8 to 10 tonight and I’m going to play this game.” We don’t do that. We’re all into this from an investment perspective, so it only works if it’s worth something.

A bidding war for the rights to the Premier League has broken out in recent years between Sky Sports, BT Sport and Amazon Prime Video, with Sky Sports often being the dominant player, although Amazon has increasingly used its bidding power in recent years. The packaging terms ensure that no broadcaster gets the rights to all English Premier League matches, so any Apple deal for Premier League broadcast rights will necessarily be lower than the exclusivity deal the company successfully negotiated with MLS. Asked if this meant that Apple was not interested in the rights to UEFA or the Premier League, Cue said:

I never say no to anything without knowing specifically [information], But are we going to sign something for a league in general, ie a specific country or a small subgroup of countries? I highly doubt we ever will. I don’t see any scenario where we would want to invest and do that because we’re not an exclusive distributor, we’re not just trying to fill some of the gaps that we have.

This [MLS deal] This is our first priority and we want it to be a huge success. If we were going to do something different it wasn’t because it would be number two, but because it would be another number one around it and we would like it to be, so I think that’s the difference we have.

Apple is working on sports content in an effort to attract new viewers to the Apple TV+ streaming service. The company has signed a deal with major League Baseball And premier league footballwhich is currently available on Apple TV+ through a mls season pass Price $14.99 per month or $99 per season. Apple has also reportedly expressed interest in acquiring it nba streaming packages,

‌Apple TV+ is also home to the hit sports comedy drama ‘Ted Lasso’, about an American college football coach hired to train an English football team.