Apple

The National Football League season is heading into Week 6, and it’s still unclear which company will become the new owner of Sunday Ticket rights — the only remaining exclusive broadcast package that hasn’t been renewed until 2030. But existing restrictions around Sunday Ticket have slowed negotiations between Apple and the NFL in recent months, according to people familiar with the matter. Talks between the league and potential buyers of Sunday Ticket are continuing, the people said.

The Big Tech behemoths are squeezing local media for content, controlling the algorithms that reach broad digital audiences, limiting or denying monetization and withholding data, which in turn control who can see the stories we are working so hard to tell. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which enjoys rare bipartisan support in Washington, is how local media need to fight back.

LIV Golf has lured some of the world’s most famous golfers to its upstart golf league, but it is having a much more difficult time finding a major U.S. media partner to broadcast its tournaments. Amazon and Apple have both passed on the media rights to LIV Golf, people familiar with the matter said, leaving the Saudi-backed circuit with a dwindling number of options.

Chris Van Amburg is leaving Apple after a four-year stint as head of video marketing. He just announced his exit in a memo to staff. In his role, Van Amburg oversaw creative marketing strategy for Apple TV+ series and films, reporting to Apple’s Cupertino-based marketing leadership. As member of Apple TV+’s marketing team, he was involved in the campaigns for such hit shows and movies as Emmy winner Ted Lasso, Severance, Oscar winner CODA and Greyhound. 

Apple’s keynote iPhone event is locked in for early Sept., which means it’s just about time for the company to announce a boatload of new products, chief among them being this year’s lineup of new iPhones.

The NFL is finding a new home for its Sunday Ticket package, and the bidding is down to two of the world’s largest tech companies and one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. Amazon, Apple and Disney are all vying for the out-of-market set, which the NFL reportedly wants to shift at least partly to a streaming property. The league is seeking $2.5 billion to $3 billion annually for Sunday Ticket.

NBCUniversal and Apple News offer marketers new content options and scale within new markets.

Apple and Major League Soccer have announced a 10-year partnership on a streaming service that will allow fans to watch every game without local blackouts or restrictions. The service will be available exclusively through the Apple TV app beginning next year.

On Thursday, Amazon reported a loss of $3.84 billion, or $7.56 a share, for the first three months of the year. A year ago, it reported a profit of $8.1 billion, or $15.79 a share, for the first quarter. Wall Street analysts expected a profit of $8.35 a share in the latest quarter, according to FactSet. The Seattle-based e-commerce giant’s stock almost 10% in after-hours trading.

The results for the January-March period drew a picture of a still-expanding empire generating massive profits that have yielded the firm a $2.7 trillion market value — the largest among U.S. companies.

Apple is about to take a, well, something out of the NFL’s rights portfolio. The tech behemoth reportedly has emerged as the favorite to land the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package, according to Matthew Belloni of PUCK.news, via Sports Business Journal. An unnamed source told Belloni that the deal is actually done, and that it’s being kept under wraps at Apple’s request.

Apple and Google are pushing privacy changes, but a shift in digital tracking is giving some platforms a bigger advertising advantage.

Apple’s CODA won the Oscar for best picture. Cool. But what happens when Big Tech stops throwing money around?

The new streaming deal between Major League Baseball and Apple is worth $85 million annually over seven years, according to several sources familiar with the agreement who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the terms.

The tech giant reported a total of $123.9 billion in revenue, while Wall Street analysts expected the Tim Cook–led company to make $118.3 billion.

Now that Amazon has established itself in live sports, most recently through a $1 billion deal to air “Thursday Night Football,” Apple is trying to jump into the game. Apple is in talks with Major League Baseball to acquire the rights to its weekday package, according to people with knowledge of the deal who asked not to be named because discussions are confidential. An agreement would, for the first time, align the most valuable U.S. tech company with a pro sports media package and give Apple a major content boost for its streaming service, Apple TV+.

In addition, Charlotte Stoudt is hoining the series as showrunner. Stoudt coming on as showrunner is part of a new, multi-year overall deal that she has signed with Apple. Kerry Ehrin, who served as showrunner on the show’s first two seasons, will serve as a consultant on season 3 while also developing new projects for Apple under her overall deal.

The iPhone maker’s value tripled since 2018 as its sales continued to soar and it spent hundreds of billions of dollars on its own stock.

Brand Keys said comfort dominates amid COVID-19 trial by fire.

NFL executives privately prefer a pure-play technology giant like Apple over a ‘retailer’ like Amazon, The Athletic reports.

Google’s $2.1 billion real-estate purchase is the latest in a string of blockbuster deals from big tech companies.

Facebook today acknowledged that the performance of its ads has suffered as Apple has rolled out new privacy controls for iOS users, and it could be poised to get even worse as Facebook offsets it by charging higher prices and increasing the ad loads in its feeds.

The first ad for the new iPhone, from TBWA\Media Arts Lab, shows tense, high-action scenes being shot with the device.

As Apple and Google enact privacy changes, businesses are grappling with the fallout, Madison Avenue is fighting back and Facebook has cried foul.

Apple said its new iPhone 13 models have better screens, cameras and battery life, but it didn’t announce any major new advances.

The company, under pressure from app developers and regulators, is making concessions while protecting lucrative parts of its App Store.

Apple is interested in streaming rights for the National Football League’s Sunday Ticket package. Apple has had discussions with NFL executives, but the NFL is also speaking with TV networks and other tech firms as well.

Apple sped right past Wall Street’s expectations for its second fiscal quarter of 2021. For the three months ending on March 27, Apple reported $89.6 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $1.40. That was above the Wall Street expectations of $77.35 million in revenue and 99 cents per share. Apple hit a new high in revenue from its services and Mac sales in the quarter, with more than $9 billion in Mac sales. Services revenue totaled nearly $17 billion the quarter. International sales accounted for 67% of the quarter’s revenue.

The next major update to the iPhone operating system, iOS 14.5, will be released “next week,” Apple said Tuesday. The detail was slipped into new product announcements Apple made Tuesday. IOS 14.5 has a lot of new features, but the one that’s being most closely watched is called ATT, or App Tracking Transparency. Companies that rely on online advertising, especially Facebook, have said that the privacy change will reduce the effectiveness and profitability of targeted ads and potentially roil the online advertising business.

The company earned nearly $29 billion, or $1.68 per share, in its latest quarter, a 29% increase from the same time in the previous year. Revenue surged 21% to $111.4 billion. All those numbers exceeded analyst estimates, but investors evidently had even higher hopes for Apple. The company’s stock dipped 1% in extended trading after the quarterly results came out.

The iPhone giant has explored adding a paid audio product, a risky move given the proliferation of free, ad-supported programming.

Though deprived of his big online megaphones, Trump does have alternative options of much smaller reach, led by the far right-friendly Parler — even if Google and Apple both removed it from their app stores.