Apple claims that viewers "around the world" can "watch all MLS, Leagues Cup, and select MLS NEXT Pro and MLS NEXT matches in one place—without any local broadcast blackouts or the need for a traditional pay TV bundle."
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A blog post on Apple's newsroom site seems to suggest that while the service will be exclusive to the Apple TV app, it will be billed separately from Apple's catch-all Apple TV+ streaming service. That said, a limited number of MLS and League Cup matches will be available for free to Apple TV+ subscribers.
The deal, the terms of which have not been disclosed but is reportedly in the range of $2.5 billion over the entire contract, is also another significant migration of live sports from TV to a streaming platform. [...]
Soccer has been seen as a prime target for streaming services. The sport lacks the broad appeal in the U.S. of other major professional leagues, but it does have a passionate fan base that is younger than those for other events.
Apple will pay MLS a minimum of $250 million per year in each of the next 10 years. If the number of people who subscribe to the MLS streaming service crosses a certain threshold, Apple will begin sharing subscription revenue with the league. The specific number of subscribers needed to cross that threshold and the exact cut of revenue Apple would share with MLS have not been made public.
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The real significance of this deal for the big leagues across the pond is that Apple has finally taken the plunge. European football clubs got rich off the back of battles for eyeballs in their domestic markets between their big traditional broadcaster and whatever new cable or satellite network entered their market 30 years ago. But peace has broken out on those fronts across the continent, leaving the EPL and all the other leagues batting their eyelids at the FAANGs — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google – to come in and start throwing money around.
Did you know that with macOS Ventura, Clarus the Dogcow has at long last returned home? Recently, while doing something else, I accidentally hit Cmd+Shift+P which opened the Page Setup dialog. I was greeted, surprisingly, with a new high-resolution version of the classic Clarus icon that I’d never seen before. I looked at it briefly, and then closed the dialog and went back to whatever I was doing before. I had assumed that becuase I’d been in a 3rd-party app at the time, that the Clarus icon was just some easter egg the developer had left. But a little while later, I got to thinking. What were the chances that someone went to the trouble of customizing the Page Setup dialog, of all things, just for an easter egg? Zero, it turns out. That dialog shows Clarus on the page preview in every app.
In addition to the rather dull options for portrait or landscape printing, the ImageWriter’s Page Setup gave you checkboxes for more exciting options. And Clarus would do tricks when you selected these other options.
Apple today announced that the new 13-inch MacBook Pro equipped with the M2 chip will be available to order worldwide starting Friday, June 17 at 5 a.m. Pacific Time. Apple said deliveries to customers and in-store availability will begin Friday, June 24.
To earn the award, Apple Watch users will need to complete a yoga workout that lasts for 20 minutes or more on June 21.
iA Writer 6 brings the most important update since the launch of the product 12 years ago with the Markdown feature. This clean, simple, and distraction-free writing app now features a brand new wikilink feature, making it easier to connect, browse, and rediscover your writing.
Firefox has started to roll out Total Cookie Protection, a browser feature that competes with Safari's privacy systems by restricting how cookies are used and cutting down cross-site tracking.
Meditation app Simple Habit’s founder, Yunha Kim, is launching a new app today called Sleep Reset to help you improve your sleep. The app aims to bring users the same treatment they would otherwise receive in sleep clinics — such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) — to mobile devices.
PATs authenticate an HTTP request automatically in the background. Web users won't notice a thing, and cloud providers such as Cloudflare and Fastly are already incorporating the technology.
As of this week, Apple will begin shipping repaired iPhone 12 models in a new brown box that is 100% plastic free and created with bleach-free paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, according to a company memo obtained by MacRumors. Until now, all repaired iPhones shipped in a white box.
The company is now testing the free version in Canada, where users are able to access Photoshop on the web through a free Adobe account. Adobe describes the service as “freemium” and eventually plans to gate off some features that will be exclusive to paying subscribers. Enough tools will be freely available to perform what Adobe considers to be Photoshop’s core functions.
Celia Castleman and Kelly Cox designed the app, which they named The Drop, to share exclusively human breast milk. The Drop allows parents who are overproducing, or have time to pump more milk, to distribute their excess to parents who are in need.
Breastmilk will always be in supply, the founders said. They wanted to elevate a form of feeding that isn’t reliant on factories or subject to shift due to crises.
I am sort of happy that Apple doesn't seem to be adding sports content into Apple TV+ (except for some 'trial' episodes) so Apple may continue to keep the price of Apple TV+ low.
But then, I wonder: will Apple also keep the price of sports content low? Will Apple price sports content at different levels in different countries? (Does anyone outside of North America want to pay for MLS?) Will there be sports bundling of MLB and MLS and whatever else Apple is pursuing? Or a new tier for Apple One?
Someone is definitely working full time with Numbers documents over at Apple, I would think.
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Thanks for reading.