Analyst: Apple Should Buy ESPN from Disney if it Really Wants to Dive Into Live Sports
What is Apple’s live sports endgame? The company has taken some intriguing steps in offering live sports via streaming in the past few years, as it added a package of MLB games that now stream on Apple TV+ as “Friday Night Baseball.” It also agreed to a landmark deal with Major League Soccer and will stream every MLS game of the next decade on its new platform MLS Season Pass.
The company was a longtime front-runner to acquire NFL Sunday Ticket before that league’s out-of-market games service moved to YouTube TV, and it made a very streaming-forward offer to the Pac-12 in early August which is now defunct because of the number of schools that have announced they’re leaving that conference.
With all this interest in live sports, it’s no wonder that Apple has been brought up as a potential partner for Disney when it tries to create a streaming version of the ESPN group of channels. But according to Deadline, Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives, who has made a career of following Apple, says the company should take a bigger swing if it’s serious about its live sports future.
Ives wrote to clients that he thinks Apple should just buy ESPN from Disney outright. This would be a wiser move, he argues, than buying all of Disney, as rumors from around Wall Street have speculated the company might try to do in the next few years.
“The massive appetite for live sports content remains the laser focus for [Apple] now to boost its streaming future and further tap into its massive installed base of 2 billion iOS devices worldwide,” Ives wrote to clients. “We believe the answer and the shoe that fits for Apple is the golden ESPN assets which potentially may be on the table in one form or another as [Disney CEO Bob] Iger and the Board strategically and carefully look at Disney’s core assets over the coming months.”
The 2 billion iOS devices Ives mentioned are the specific reason Iger would want to partner with Apple to help distribute a streaming version of ESPN. Such a network of devices would help ESPN reach a huge audience around the globe once it’s ready to offer a version of itself outside of cable. But Iger has also signaled a willingness to sell off ESPN and Disney's other linear channels to focus its streaming efforts on Disney+ and Hulu, and if it does Ives believes Apple should pounce.
Acquiring ESPN “would make a ton of strategic sense” for Apple, allowing it to “gain valuable sports content, major TV rights across each of the major professional and college sports packages, and change the cross-sell opportunities and attractiveness of Apple TV looking ahead while putting Apple on the sports map, globally speaking,” he wrote.
For now, the partnership between Disney and Apple remains limited to the addition of Disney+ with every new Apple augmented reality headset. But there are all kinds of options on the table for future dealings between the two companies, and analysts like Ives will continue to kick in their two cents until some decisions are made regarding ESPN’s future with Disney.
Disney+
Disney+ is a video streaming service with over 13,000 series and films from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, The Muppets, and more. It is available in 61 countries and 21 languages. It is notable for its popular original series like “The Mandalorian,” “Ms. Marvel,” “Loki,” “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” and “Andor.”