Apple TV Plus experiencing the Messi effect. Viewers are reputedly flocking to the streaming service all thanks to Lionel Messi. The Argentine and world cup winner once again scores big for Apple TV Plus.
Apple TV Plus Messi Effect
Apple TV Plus reportedly made a 10-year $2.5 billion deal with Major League Soccer and it now appears to be paying off. And according to Jorge Mas, who is one of the owners of Inter Miami, in a Tweet that was then shared by Apple’s Tim Cook, subscriptions to Apple’s MLS Season Pass have over doubled – and it’s all down to the world cup winner and former FC Barcelona star Lionel Messi.
Messi as you should know is a genuine sporting superstar and his arrival in the US has reportedly kicked the appeal for soccer into orbit ever since he began playing in the US this very July. He is one that is very popular with everybody and he also has a particularly big fanbase among the Spanish-speaking community. And according to Mas: “Spanish language viewership on MLS Season Pass on Apple TV has surpassed over 50 percent for Messi matches and continues to rise.”
Apple Subscriber Numbers
Apple as you know doesn’t talk subscriber numbers but just before Messi arrived it was believed to have close to 1 million MLS subscribers on Apple TV Plus, so doubling that in just a month is pretty impressive. And just as Tim Cook revealed to investors in the previous week: “It’s clearly in the early days, but we are beating our expectation in terms of subscribers, and the fact that Messi went to Inter Miami helped us out there a bit. And so we’re very excited about it.”
There is quite a lot of money to be made from sports streaming, which is the reason the best streaming services are all over it. For instance, as we reported in the previous week, Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max reportedly plans to add sports streaming for games from MLB, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League as well as the National Collegiate Athletics Association, which is including the March Madness of college basketball.
Streamers Will Spend $8 Billion on Sporting Rights This Year According To Research
Streamers according to research by Ampere Analysis, will reportedly spend $8 billion on sporting rights this very year. That as you should know is 21% of global sports rights investment, which is up from 13% in the previous year. “The exclusive NFL deal with Amazon that kicked off in September 2022 was arguably the turning point for sports on general entertainment OTT platforms,” the firm stated. “It represented the largest single deal signed to date by any sports streaming service, and has since been surpassed only by YouTube – also with the NFL.”
The Reason for the Sports Have Become a Big Deal
The main reason that sports have become a big deal all of a sudden is partly due to the fact that sports broadcast as well as streaming rights tend to be signed for fairly long periods which typically is several years if not decades, so a lot of deals were rightly made before streaming tech was as good as it is at the momnet. And the streaming market and industry have become much more competitive in the last couple of years, with many big firms making use of their very deep pockets to put huge sums on the table.
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