MLS partners with Apple to stream season
Major League Soccer watchers in Southern California had it pretty good last year.
Taken together, the Galaxy and Los Angeles Football Club appeared on 36 locally produced regular-season broadcasts and another 32 on a wide array of national platforms that did not require scaling a paywall to tune in.
As an announced $2.5 billion decade-long media rights agreement between Apple and MLS gets underway when the 2023 season commences on Feb. 25, the city rivals — two of the league's highest profile and valued teams — are scheduled to appear in just 15 free league games, including two of the three “El Trafico” contests.
MLS Season Pass allows fans to stream every MLS regular-season match, the entire playoffs and Leagues Cup, along with the league's lower-division matches and a deep reservoir of team-generated content, live, wherever they are in the world, without any blackouts.
The shift away from how sports have traditionally been watched in the U.S. may suit some fans more than others, but for MLS and Apple the joint streaming venture between the largest company in the world and the top soccer league in the U.S. is being billed as a historic first.
Tapping into Apple's prolific ecosystem through billions of devices and the Apple TV app, along with smart TVs, streaming devices, settop boxes and game consoles, and on the web at tv.apple. com, Season Pass has the potential to provide the 30-year-old league its largest audiences to date as it leaves behind fragmented broadcast agreements in the U.S. and abroad.
Season-ticket holders around the league received a complimentary subscription to the service. For everyone else starting with the service's soft launch on Feb. 1, which included more than 4,000 pieces of video content, MLS Season Pass is available on the Apple TV app for $14.99 per month during the season or $99 per season. Apple TV+ subscribers can sign up at a special price of $12.99 per month or $79 per season.
In December, the league announced a four-year linear TV rights agreement for North America. FOX Sports and TelevisaUnivision hold rights in the U.S., while TSN and RDS will carry matches in Canada. These broadcasts will offer an average of 34 regular-season and eight MLS Cup playoff games per season.
FOX has been tabbed as the network home for the MLS Cup through 2026, though that could change if MLS Season Pass is considered successful enough for Apple to seek exclusivity. The service will also be available in more than 300,000 commercial establishments via DirecTV this year.
Taking a clean broadcast feed produced by Apple's vendors IMG Productions and NEP Broadcast Services, the league's linear TV partners will employ their own announcers and graphics packages.
The arrangement gives the league added control of broadcasts, raising questions about the editorial tone of coverage moving forward, considering Apple considers the partnership to be more of a marriage in that they'll jointly succeed or not.
The international appeal of soccer and the league's assortment of global talent along with the entirety of its media rights available at one time as part of a strategy devised in 2018 made the MLS a strong partner for Apple,
which has increased its position in sports since Jim DeLorenzo joined the Cupertino, Calif., company in 2020.
As regional sports networks struggle and streaming providers attempt to survive as consumers adapt among a crowded sportswatching marketplace, the Apple-MLS partnership is envisioned as having the potential to disrupt the moneyladen sports media landscape.
The production plan developed by the league, Apple and its vendors offers more than 950 matches, totaling over 2,000 hours of live match programming in English, Spanish and, for the league's Canadian clubs, French.
To this end, the MLS calendar was reconfigured from a jumbled schedule of matches on a variety of days and start times, often at the whim of local or national networks, to consistent Wednesday and Saturday slates of night games featuring mostly 7:30 p.m. kickoffs.
Each match during the adjustable 5 ½-hour programming window includes countdown and postgame shows bookending a whiparound broadcast that moves from match to match as action dictates.