Apple strikes five year deal for Formula 1 rights
As widely expected (and teased by none other than Eddy Cue), Apple announced on Friday that it’s zoomed into a five-year deal with Formula 1 to be the exclusive United States broadcaster of the racing circuit. Previously, ESPN had rights to air races in the U.S.
Apple’s coverage is starting-line-to-checkered-flag, including everything from practice to the Grands Prix and will be available to all Apple TV1 subscribers. Practices and some races will also be available for free to all in the app.
And Apple being Apple, this deal goes well beyond simply showing the races and instead across all of the company’s properties. There will be live updates in the Apple Sports app, of course, including Live Activities and “a designated widget” for the Home Screen, but also integrations in Apple News, Apple Maps, Apple Music, and even Apple Fitness+.2 (What of Apple Invites? Will you be able to quickly organize your watch parties?!)
As for F1 TV Premium, the circuit’s own subscription service, it’s not going anywhere—at least for the moment. Instead, it’ll be available only via a subscription to Apple TV. If you’ve already got such a subscription, you get F1 TV Premium as part of the package. (It’s not immediately clear if that means the races will be in the app, or you’ll simply log in to the F1 TV Premium app with your Apple account.)
More details are still to come, according to Apple, including more on how the races will be produced and all the integration details.
Though I’m not an F1 aficionado, I do find myself wondering about exactly how far Apple will go here. Five years is a goodly amount of time, and it’s possible that what this product looks like in year one of that deal is very different from what it looks like in year five. Will Apple spend the time putting its own stamp on the entire production, as it has with other sporting forays like Friday Night Baseball and Major League Soccer? This deal is certainly closer to the latter, if not quite the “wall-to-wall” terms that the company aspires to—after all, these rights are only for the U.S., not worldwide.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
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