Last season, Apple made Friday Night Baseball available to all users for free — it was watchable by anyone with an Apple ID and access to the Apple TV app. That “limited time offer” has now gone away. For 2023, an Apple TV+ subscription is required to tune in to see the games.
Unlike MLS Season Pass, Friday Night Baseball is not a separate subscription package. It is simply an added perk of the standard $6.99/mo Apple TV+ subscription.
There are a few minor catches—aren’t there always? According to Apple, “Radio broadcasts for the Texas Rangers are available only for the team’s home games. In Canada, radio broadcasts are available only for Toronto Blue Jays games.” Tough break for Canadian fans who want to listen to non-Blue Jays broadcasters of non-Blue Jays games, and I don’t even want to know about the contractual issues that preclude the Rangers radio voices from being used on away games.
The rights under consideration would allow Apple to show Premier League games in the UK, as well as lower league matches run by the English Football League, said two of the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private.
[...]
Pushing into English football would pit Apple against entrenched media companies such as Comcast’s Sky and Warner Bros Discovery, which last year agreed to a joint venture with BT Sport. It also could throw down the gauntlet with Amazon, which has become a force in streaming European football.
Supporters hit out at the Premier League club and producers of the Apple TV show after crowd scenes supposedly shot in west London were used during a storyline involving Roy Kent – a fictional former Champions League winner with the Blues.
But now, amid user complaints over the current state of Instagram, Hipstamatic is returning to the App Store today with a relaunch of its social network for iPhone photography enthusiasts.
Microsoft is now letting anyone preview Microsoft Loop, a collaborative hub offering a new way of working across Office apps and managing tasks and projects. Much like Notion, Microsoft Loop includes workspaces and pages where you can import and organize tasks, projects, and documents. But what sets the two apart is Loop’s shareable components that let you turn any page into a real-time block of content that can be pasted into Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Word on the web, and Whiteboard.
The ThunderBay 8 can serve as a high-performance personal data center with multiple configuration options to suit ever-growing storage requirements. It can accommodate the needs of individuals with data-intensive video editing, high-resolution image, and VR workflows, who need abundant drive space to store large format files, as well as fast data transfer speeds to ensure that they remain workable.
Last fall Nanoleaf announced that it would be bringing Matter to its Essentials smart lighting lineup along with launching some new bulb types. Now the latest products have arrived with Thread/Matter for the smart A19, GU10, BR30 bulbs, Recessed Downlight, and Lightstrip.
You’ll see a lot of problems with SwiftUI mentioned in these posts, but the overall experience was wonderful. This new way of building apps gets a wholehearted recommendation from our entire team: designers and developers alike.
We also found that many of the issues encountered on macOS were things we had done wrong on iOS. Porting the app to the Mac made both platforms better. We’re also rethinking our View architecture so things that are currently Mac-only can be used to improve the iPad experience.
I’ve always felt like the iPad mini was a weird product in search of a use case. Buying weird $250 android tablets to run CarPlay seems silly when you could buy a fancy new iPad mini that would be way more reliable and easier to incorporate into any car’s interior, plus you’d have a fully charged entertainment device when you got on a plane or into your hotel room.
It’s a loss for consumers and for the communities that spring up around photography. It’s also a stark reminder that corporate ownership, far from being a safe haven, may increase the likelihood of a popular site disappearing.
Remember when iTunes started out as a simple little MP3 player? And then Apple added all sorts of stuff -- movies, television, podcasts, ringtones, apps -- into it, and made iTunes into a simple little monster player / store / whatever?
Well... the Apple TV app is already not a simple little video player (it's no QuickTime TV, I can tell you that), but with Apple adding sports programming today, and who knows what tomorrow, Apple better watch out to not get into another iTunes mess again.
~
Thanks for reading.