APPLE TV have effectively ruled themselves out of a bid for the next round of Prem TV rights – in a major blow for League chiefs.
The next three-year bid tender for domestic rights, currently worth around £3billion per season, will go out to broadcasters before the end of the year.
GettyApple have suggested they would only be interested in joining broadcasters like Sky Sports covering the Premier League if ‘global rights’ were involved[/caption]
League bosses are ready to green light an extension to 270 live TV matches each campaign in a bid to push up the total price.
But expectations that Apple TV would be interested in taking one of the smaller packages as a gateway into the Prem were scotched by Apple’s senior vice-president Eddie Cue.
And Cue signalled the company would not be interested in investing in the Prem unless it was a deal that mirrored the new £1.95bn exclusive global partnership with Major League Soccer.
Cue said: “I don’t like the word exclusivity because that’s important but not as important.
“What’s important to us is global rights.
“We’re a global company, we have a large number of customers in every country in the world and it’s not exciting for me to have something that one person can have but another can’t.
“Another matter is that we’re throwing a significant amount of engineering and expertise into the MLS product and I can’t justify throwing what I think are the best engineers in the world on a small sub-set product.
“It has to be a partnership because our level of investment is significant.”
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Pushed further whether that meant no significant interest in a Prem package, Cue added: “I never say never without knowing all of the information.
”But in general we never sign any deal with any league in a specific country or a small sub-set of countries and I’d say it was highly unlikely we’d ever do that.
“I don’t think we’d ever do that.
“We wouldn’t want to invest to do that because we’re not a typical investor trying to fill in some gaps.
“MLS is our Number One thing and we want it to be a huge success.”
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