Taylor Twellman is the perfect apostle of the MLS-Apple partnership. He had a stellar broadcasting career on his ESPN — in addition to being the face of that network’s football coverage, Twellman enjoyed the contractual flexibility to morph into the network’s news and discussion shows. — but he left the company in his January to become part of a unique, one-of-a-kind show. A groundbreaking experiment in the sports media rights space — a 10-year deal between Apple and MLS in which Apple will pay soccer leagues $2.5 billion for rights to all MLS games — Regular Season, postseason, league cup, all in one place without power outages.
“For the first time in 27 years, we have a media platform and media partner with exactly the same energy and the same ambitions as the league,” said Twellman, who spent 13 years at ESPN. “This league is ready to go to new heights and they need to go to new heights. The way Apple does business has always been unique to me. ) There were 62 different start times for the game, and only Apple came along and said, “I want to change this.” We will simplify the schedule. That’s what all of us in this league and this game have been waiting for in his 27 years. What convinced me was Apple’s energy, resources, and ambition to take Major League Soccer where I’ve always wanted to go but haven’t been yet. ”
The journey began on Saturday when the MLS kicked off its 28th season. Interestingly, when I hopped onto his Apple TV for Nashville SC-New York City FC at 4:25 p.m. Finally arrived. Host Liam McHugh said, “A new era in MLS begins now. Image quality and graphics jump off the screen, studios featuring McHugh, Kaylyn Kyle, Sacha Kljestan, and Bradley Wright-Phillips look futuristic, and conversations between groups come alive.” was treated as a serious football viewer, in contrast to what I mostly received: Qatar’s recently completed World Cup studio coverage.Welcome, Apple.
@TVAnswerMan To me, this looks like a nice 1080p from the Apple TV MLS Season Pass on first impressions. I will send you another picture when the game starts. pic.twitter.com/ZdkSA6UgSt
— Dallas Dillinger (@ManBengals) February 25, 2023
My colleague Daniel Brown’s article on Apple’s MLS ambitions is worth reading about Apple’s grand design. Fox/FS1 regular season 34 games As an exclusive US English and Spanish TV home. One of his great viewer perks when watching his pass in the MLS season was the ability to switch between telecast and radio announcers. Same as the option to watch the Spanish version. I loved the first one I saw at MLS 360, a Red Zone style show. The pricing point — Apple TV+ subscribers will have to pay extra for the MLS Season Pass — will be a problem for less enthusiastic fans.
Daniel Slaton, a retired US national team player and broadcaster for the San Jose Earthquakes before joining MLS/Apple, said the partnership offers an opportunity to change how MLS is perceived globally. said to provide. “If we do our job right, I think we can help change the landscape of how media is consumed in this country and around the world,” Slaton said. It will be graded either ‘A’ or ‘F’. But I believe people will take the leap because of what we’re building and presenting to the world. ”
Marcelo Balboa, who calls the MLS Spanish broadcast alongside Jorge Perez Navarro, said: “Ruined hotel, $5 a day. ) Just like the women sold out (winning) stadiums at the World Cup, nobody expected it to sell out because it’s in the U.S. Do we compare ourselves to the EPL? It shouldn’t be.We are a global market.The big teams are coming and taking our players.I think we should be happy to give this league a chance.MLS to all the rest of the world. Sometimes we get stuck in comparison to the league, we are 27 years new compared to a league that is 100 years old.”
Balboa, Slaton and Twellman said they were not instructed by Apple to become league cheerleaders. (here List of league stations and programming. “Just because I have Apple on my mic flag and I don’t say ESPN doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion,” Twellman said. It doesn’t mean we haven’t had the same conversations behind the scenes about it either, and it would be interesting if certain things were revealed.”
I asked Twellman if he was worried that ESPN — still the largest sports brand in the United States — would deliberately freeze the MLS now that it no longer has a financial stake in it.
“ESPN has had MLS for 27 years. How much have you done with SportsCenter?” Twellman said. “The football people in that company were scratching, scraping, doing whatever they could. …But I don’t think they can ignore this. America will be held in the United States in 2024. The World Cup will be held here in 2026. ESPN and NBC of the world have no say in these entities, so it’s still news in 2026. Given what MLS can do behind it, they can’t afford to ignore it when the foundation of sports centers and news programming is what’s happening right now and what’s popular. ESPN will have to make a decision if they want to show it, but I’m not sure if this league has to anymore given how the TV medium is changing .
You can fill your library with the amount of words spilled about college football media rights contracts. ) This publication has several college football writers. offer an idea More thoughts and deeper analysis of the situation. I recommend them all, as well as Daniel Kaplan and Bill Shea on the streaming vs. cable dilemma. After talking with industry sources last week, here’s what I can offer as of this writing: There are a lot of companies that are open to something with the Pac-12, and they’re open to something with the Pac-12.(That’s the difference between the Big Ten and SEC football and the Pac-12.) For example, on Friday night his Pac -12 There is conceptual interest from Amazon in the football game. why? Well, they could tout it heavily during the “Thursday Night Football” franchise and not go against the college football schedule on Saturdays, which is another great addition to Amazon’s growing sports portfolio. will be a work of art. But the price has to be right and my understanding is that Amazon and the Pac-12 were wide apart on all kinds of deals earlier this month. Pac-12 premium inventory (such as conference championships) is certainly interesting for companies with linear assets, but will conferences split it? interest, and perhaps a football game on Saturday at 10:30 p.m. NASCAR, etc.) are being put up for bid. ) and Disney is in cost-conscious mode, there was no chance of breaking the bank for an inventory of Pac-12s. but when you can get a longtime linear player signed in a matter of weeks, signing a streamer is more complicated and takes longer. If I were a consultant and Pac-12 asked us what to do (note this hasn’t happened), I would have signed a short-term deal with ESPN and one of his streaming services. will tie That money doesn’t please my university president (and George Kryavkov was hired to make a lot of money), but I play in the mid-term market and exchange dollars for short-term exposure. and see if streaming or cable is better. For example, the year 2028.
Some interesting things I read last week:
• Would you like to go to Greenland? To
• Americans in their 30s are racking up debt. By Gina Herb and AnnaMaria Andriotis of The Wall Street Journal.
• LIV sounds and anger mean nothing. Sally Jenkins, Washington Post.
• Warner Bros. Discovery is exiting the regional sports TV business. By Joe Flint for The Wall Street Journal.
• When Pele visited the Howard University soccer team: “He transcended everything.” Pablo Maurer athletic.
• A Fox News host privately and publicly spoke out about voter misconduct.
• Russian propaganda buys Twitter blue-check verification. By Joseph Meng of The Washington Post.
• Why is a “national divorce” such a bad idea? By Wilfred Reilly of the National Review.
• A year of radical new approaches to America’s overdose crisis.
• Korfball is nothing new, but its proponents say it has new relevance in questioning the gender gap in sport. Now it needs to be popular outside of Holland.
• classy movement By MLS Communications to honor Grant Wahl.
• Remembering Mandy Jenkins, Kent State University alumnus and national digital news pioneer. (My condolences to her family.) By Anna Huntsman, Ideastream Public Media.
• This football coach spent years saving the city’s kids from gun violence. Then someone shot him. Suzette Hackney America today.
• Sean McVay disappeared when the Rams imploded.Jordan Rodrigue athletic.
• First-ever oral history of how US and Western officials saw signs of a ground war in Europe, their desperate attempts to stop it, and the moment Putin actually crossed the border. By Garrett M. Graff in Politico.
• Lonely exploited immigrant children perform brutal jobs across America By Hannah Dreyer, The New York Times.
• Colleagues claim that an internal review found “falsified data” in the Alzheimer’s study at Stanford University. By Theo Baker for The Stanford Daily.
Episode 281 of the Sports Media Podcast features a conversation between The Boston Globe Sports Media Writer Chad Finn and Sports Business Journal Assistant Managing Editor/Digital Austin Karp. In this podcast, the group discusses the NBA All-Star Game, which averaged a record 4.6 million viewers on TNT/TBS. What to expect from the launch of the MLS/Apple Season Pass and what to expect from the product’s appearance and viewership. Daytona 500 viewership. How Daytona compares to other sports facilities. Launch of XFL. Whether you think spring football is going to work or not. Potential Pac-12 Media Rights Agreement. Why the P-12 has little influence over media companies. Perspectives on LIV golf as a media play. Such as Charles Barkley as a potential CNN analyst.
(Pictured of Javine Brown, 23, celebrating her goal against Real Salt Lake at BC Place on Saturday night: Christopher Morris/Corbis/Getty Images)
