Recent rumours around Apple’s interest in live sports programming have been all over the place, ranging from:

• 🤷🏼 small- ( ⚾️ picking-up MLB’s mid-week leftovers: Apple and MLB hold ‘Substantial Talks’ over Broadcast Deal), to

• 🧐 medium- ( 🏈 licensing NFL’s Sunday Ticket: Apple reportedly wants in on NFL Sunday Ticket), and

• 🚨 large-sized investment tickets ( 📺 acquiring of Disney’s worldwide leader in sports: SBJ Predicts Apple Could Acquire ESPN in 2024).

Other “Big Tech” players have tipped their toes into sports rights acquisition since the middle of the 2010s. Most tested, failed, and redefined their proposition when talking to sports rights owners ever since:   

• Facebook (= enabler for self-monetization for long(er)-tail sports,

• YouTube (= top-of-funnel, ad-supported monetization tool and awareness builder for sports rights holders), and

• Twitter (= real-time marketing / tune-in channel for sports rights holders).

Amazon has been one to double-down on their initial investment in live sports programming, in many cases as an acquisition tool for its broader Amazon Prime membership (think: 🌟 sports as a feature).

Overall, the technology giants’ long-awaited foray into live sports broadcasting has never materialised and, besides Amazon, only Apple and Netflix are left as dark horses — or at least some much-needed leverage for rights owners to stir-up competitions. While Netflix seems to focus on storytelling instead of live sports and thinks to have identified other new frontiers to drive to incremental growth (namely gaming), this blog investigates (on a very simplified basis) whether Apple would be the one that is positioned to drive outsized returns from live sports programming — either via subscription economics ( 💳 Apple TV+) or, alternatively, by shifting the basis of competition and generate platform economies ( 📺 Apple TV).

... with the 🏈 NFL Sunday Ticket, the league’s out-of-market premium product in the 🇺🇸 United States, taking center stage.

📝 Main takeaways include:

🔂 DTC subscription economics for OTT streaming services cannot compete with the outsized and stable returns of B2B (Enterprise) or B2C (Traditional Pay-TV) subscription businesses.

👎🏻 Subscription (Apple TV+) and platform (Apple TV) economics generate similar short-term revenues but neither would come close to generating an economic return on the acquisition of the NFL Sunday Ticket.

🔎 While depressed ARPUs and sky-high churn are insurmountable challenges for DTC subscription economics to extract sustainable value from new sign-ups, even the NFL’s premium product is unlikely to be able to materially drive the requisite market share gains of Apple TV to unlock platform revenues.

🏈 If live sports programming is a thing for Apple though, the company might run out of alternatives and NFL Sunday Ticket may still be the best option due to a multitude of reasons.

🎧 Spotify’s investment of exclusively licensing Joe Rogan’s podcast library and new episodes for a reported total of $100M over multiple years would compare to leveraging NFL Sunday Ticket to drive market share gains — and that even in a brand-safe manner. 

There is also some context and additional information on the 📺connected TV industry, its main players, and how Apple’s tvOS missed the boat compared to the 📱 mobile OS market, in which Apple’s iOS effectively duopolized the market share of both active users and consumer spent on in-app purchases together with Google’s Android.

I would appreciate any feedback or a follow on Twitter (@yannickramcke), where I share my thoughts regarding current developments in everything "Sports Business, Media & More" on a regular basis.