Daily Mail: Premier League clubs dealt major blow as Apple rule out rights bid

Story from Daily Mail:

Apple chief Eddy Cue has effectively ruled out buying a share of Premier League broadcasting rights as the technology giant want 'global rights' deals like they have with Major League Soccer.

Last summer the world's largest tech company made their first foray into live football broadcasting, striking a significant long-term global partnership with North America's top competition.

Apple's eye-catching 10-year partnership is to show all MLS matches across the world - a deal the league hailed as a 'historic first for a major professional sports league'.

The company have long been linked with bids for Premier League and Champions League rights, but Cue, part of Apple's leadership team, indicated they would only want deals with the same breadth and scope as the one with MLS.

'I don't like the word exclusivity because that's important but not as important,' Apple's senior vice president of services said. 'The global rights are important to us.

'We're a global company, we have customers in every country in the world, a large number of customers, and it's not exciting for me to have something that you can have but you can't have.

'Secondly, we're throwing a significant amount of engineering resources into the product.

'We think we're going to do some very innovative things with the product as we move forward.

'We've done some things like MLS 360 (providing live look-ins from every match), we've done the multi-viewing of games, which is again very difficult to do in other environments. And this is nothing.

'I can't justify throwing what I think are the best engineers in the world on a small subset product.

'It has to be this kind of a partnership because our level of investment is significant.

'This isn't 'hey, I've got an opening from 8pm to 10pm tonight and I'm going to put this game on'. That's not the way we're doing it.

'We're all in on this as an investment point of view, so it doesn't work unless it's something significant.'

Asked if that would then preclude at this stage, as an example, UEFA or Premier League rights, Cue said: 'I never say no to anything without knowing more specific (information).

'But, in general, are we going to sign something, any league, that is to a specific country or small a subset of countries? I highly doubt we would ever do that.

'I can't see a scenario in which we would want to invest and do that because we're not a typical distributor, we're not just trying to fill in some gaps that we have.

'This (MLS deal) is our number one thing, and we want it to be a huge success.

'If we were going to do something else it wasn't because it would be number two, it's because it would be another number one around it and we would want it to be, so I think that's the difference that we have.'