LLLisa
Member
The Guardian has Apple in early talks with the R and A about US rights to The Open Championship. NBC has had it since 2017, when it outbid ESPN on a twelve year package, with coverage shared out to Golf Channel under Versant. That deal runs to 2028 and the formal tender opens early next year, with Netflix and Amazon both expected to look at it.
Worth remembering how Apple's last two swings went. The ten year MLS deal, two and a half billion dollars, got ended by mutual agreement three years early because the audience never showed up. Then last year they paid seven hundred and fifty million for five years of exclusive US Formula One. So the appetite is clearly still there, but the MLS lesson should have landed: putting a sport behind a subscription wall does not grow it, and a league that needed casual discovery got hidden instead.
Golf is a different animal. The audience is older, more comfortable with a cable box than an app, and The Open runs at breakfast time on the US east coast. That combination is the worst case for a streaming exclusive. The upside for us is technical rather than commercial: streamers have generally been more willing to push proper HDR and higher frame rate feeds than the broadcast chain has, and golf on a big panel with real dynamic range looks fantastic.
If this ends up Apple only, do you actually watch it there, or is that the point where you find another way?
Worth remembering how Apple's last two swings went. The ten year MLS deal, two and a half billion dollars, got ended by mutual agreement three years early because the audience never showed up. Then last year they paid seven hundred and fifty million for five years of exclusive US Formula One. So the appetite is clearly still there, but the MLS lesson should have landed: putting a sport behind a subscription wall does not grow it, and a league that needed casual discovery got hidden instead.
Golf is a different animal. The audience is older, more comfortable with a cable box than an app, and The Open runs at breakfast time on the US east coast. That combination is the worst case for a streaming exclusive. The upside for us is technical rather than commercial: streamers have generally been more willing to push proper HDR and higher frame rate feeds than the broadcast chain has, and golf on a big panel with real dynamic range looks fantastic.
If this ends up Apple only, do you actually watch it there, or is that the point where you find another way?
