Wyatt21
Member
The Guardian reported preliminary talks between Apple and the R and A over US rights to The Open, with the current NBC arrangement running to 2028 and a formal tender opening early next year. My reaction is not excitement.
We have seen this movie. Apple signed a ten year, two and a half billion dollar MLS deal and then wound it down three years early because the audience never turned up. Then last year they put seven hundred fifty million into five years of exclusive US Formula One. If you follow F1 over here you already know what exclusivity means day to day: one more login, one more app that has to behave on whatever box is wired into your receiver, and no tuner fallback when the stream decides to rebuffer during the only moment that mattered.
Golf is an awkward fit on top of that. The Open is a morning event for American viewers, it runs for hours, and a lot of the people who watch it are not the people who have an Apple TV box in the rack. NBC at least drops it onto a channel your tuner already receives, with Golf Channel taking the overflow. Netflix and Amazon are expected to bid too, so the price is only going one way.
What I actually care about is the technical end. The F1 coverage has looked genuinely good. Would you take a better looking stream behind another subscription over a broadcast feed you are already paying for through your cable or antenna?
We have seen this movie. Apple signed a ten year, two and a half billion dollar MLS deal and then wound it down three years early because the audience never turned up. Then last year they put seven hundred fifty million into five years of exclusive US Formula One. If you follow F1 over here you already know what exclusivity means day to day: one more login, one more app that has to behave on whatever box is wired into your receiver, and no tuner fallback when the stream decides to rebuffer during the only moment that mattered.
Golf is an awkward fit on top of that. The Open is a morning event for American viewers, it runs for hours, and a lot of the people who watch it are not the people who have an Apple TV box in the rack. NBC at least drops it onto a channel your tuner already receives, with Golf Channel taking the overflow. Netflix and Amazon are expected to bid too, so the price is only going one way.
What I actually care about is the technical end. The F1 coverage has looked genuinely good. Would you take a better looking stream behind another subscription over a broadcast feed you are already paying for through your cable or antenna?
