Apple is allegedly in the running for another major sports broadcasting package
According to a new report, college football could be the next sport Apple pursues for its streaming platform.
Apple has made it pretty clear that they’re very interested in becoming a home for streaming sports, and they’re willing to compete with the biggest broadcasters in the industry to win coveted broadcast rights. Earlier this year Apple began streaming Friday Night Baseball MLB games via its Apple TV+ streaming service, and last month it announced an exclusive ten year partnership with Major League Soccer for the Apple TV app to be the exclusive place to watch MLS games. All this Spring Apple has been heavily rumored to be negotiating for the rights to broadcast NFL Sunday Ticket, competing with Disney and Amazon. Now Apple has its sights set on a new sports target: college football. A new report suggests that Apple just re-engaged in the bidding war for a piece of the broadcast rights to Big Ten Conference football games.
For those who may not be familiar with the college football landscape, the sport’s top tier of competition is made up of over 130 schools, divided up into several conferences. Most of the best teams in the sport are members of five of those conferences that are unofficially known as the Power 5. Last year a new wave of conference realignment began when Texas and Oklahoma announced that they were moving from the Big 12 to the SEC. In the last several days, USC and UCLA announced that they’re moving from the Pac 12 to the Big Ten. This is shifting the landscape of power and money in college football from a Power 5 to a Power 2, or at least that’s how it’s looking. The media rights for the Big Ten are up for renewal next year, and they’ve been bidding out rights packages to networks and streaming services. Apparently Apple had been involved in those negotiations, but withdrew. The additional of USC and UCLA got Apple interested enough to re-enter the bidding war.
Here’s Sports Business Journal, who broke the news about Apple’s renewed interest:
Soon after the news about USC and UCLA joining the Big Ten broke, an Apple exec called the conference with a simple message: It wanted to reengage in media-rights talks, report SBJ's John Ourand and Michael Smith. That call was emblematic of a chaotic day where media companies that had spent months finalizing how much they would pay for Big Ten rights were rushing back to the drawing board to see how the addition of two high-profile schools would change their bidding strategy.
And:
Fox Sports already had reached a deal to carry at least half of the conference’s package, and CBS was viewed as a front-runner to take at least a package of Saturday football games in the 3:30pm ET window. That left Amazon, ESPN and NBC competing for a third package. As late as this morning, Apple and Warner Bros. Discovery were not viewed as credible bidders. That could all change.
Media valuations are based on the addition of two more schools’ worth of games, plus a noticeable improvement in the quality of games on offer, which will make the second and third choices of games more attractive to networks each week.
Apple has been rumored to be interested in broadcasting rights for college football games for quite some time. There had been longstanding rumors that Apple was interested in broadcasting Pac 12 football games, though I haven’t heard anything about that recently. Given that media rights were up for grabs for the Big Ten, it makes sense that Apple had already been interested in getting a piece of what is becoming a college football super conference.
I’ve also seen some speculation that one Apple exec in particular is driving Apple’s attempt to get into the college football broadcasting business: Tim Cook. Cook attended both Auburn and Duke, so it makes sense that he’d be interested in college sports, football and basketball in particular. As a fellow college sports fan, I hope Apple really does add it to their streaming portfolio.