CNN
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Apple is taking an excellent greater swing at sports activities.
The corporate on Wednesday launched Apple Sports activities, a free app for the iPhone that delivers real-time scores, key statistics, and reside betting odds.
At launch, customers can have entry to reside information from the NBA, NHL, and MLS, amongst different leagues. The app, Apple’s first within the sports activities enviornment, is being launched forward of March Insanity, providing real-time information for each males’s and girls’s NCAA basketball. Different leagues might be added over time, together with the NFL and MLB.
“We created Apple Sports activities to present sports activities followers what they need — an app that delivers extremely quick entry to scores and stats,” mentioned Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vp of Companies who oversees the app and was personally concerned in its creation.
The app, which won’t embody promoting at its launch, represents Apple’s newest dive into the world of sports activities, a multibillion-dollar enterprise that expertise firms have made current entrants into, difficult the legacy media firms who’ve historically held the profitable broadcast rights. It additionally threatens to upend the cell sports activities app area that has lengthy been dominated by advertising-supported apps from ESPN and others.
Apple has lately struck offers with varied sports activities leagues, such because the MLB and MLS, to stream video games on its Apple TV+ streaming service. Amazon, a chief rival within the expertise and streaming trade, has began solely airing “Thursday Evening Soccer” and an NFL sport on Black Friday.
Whereas Apple Sports activities can alert customers to the place a sport is being broadcast, it won’t stream video games instantly contained in the app, as a substitute pointing customers to the right app to observe the motion.
Expertise and media firms are more and more eyeing sports activities rights to amass a paying viewers for his or her streaming companies. In current months, the NFL playoffs and Tremendous Bowl shattered scores data and NBCUniversal’s unique Peacock broadcast of a wild card sport led to the biggest single day of streaming on record, in response to Nielsen.