Apple TV+ wants to increase its sports streaming offer, but has strong competition!
Whether based on fiction or real life, sports programming has been a sure bet for Apple TV+. The series based on the life of a coach who ends up running a soccer club in another country, Ted Lasso, is the most successful on the platform, and broadcasting Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer won more followers. Yet even Apple can’t have everything it wants.
There has been speculation for months about the possibility of Apple acquiring the rights to the NBA, but this week a CNBC report digs deeper into that possibility. While the NBA wants to sell various streaming packages to “triple its current revenue”, existing deals with other chains prevented Apple from bidding.
Apple wants to increase its sports offer
Currently, Warner Bros, Discovery and Disney have exclusive TV rights to NBA games. For him no formal discussions can take place until these companies have agreed to waive their exclusive trading windowsending in April 2024.
According to information published by CNBC, Disney might be the most interested in making a bid to keep the rightsbut a comment from CEO Bob Iger suggested the offer would fall short of NBA expectations.
At the time, Iger said he hoped to keep the NBA rights, but he spoke to ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro that “We just have to be more selective” buying more sports rights, with the intention of moving ESPN from linear to ESPN+.
Currently, Apple, Google and Amazon are three companies interested in acquiring the rights, but none of them can make a formal offer at this stage. However, other rumors suggest that if he does not reach the sum he hopes to obtain, the NBA would choose to sign non-exclusive agreements, and CNBC suggests that deals could be struck with three or four different companies. These may be for separate packages, but there may also be overlap.
In any case, Amazon is the most advanced at this stage, since currently can stream games in brazilthanks to a previous agreement with the NBA.
In any case, it is possible that this situation is not entirely attractive to Apple and prefers exclusivity like she’s done with similar deals, but the million dollar question is how much she’s willing to spend to get it.
