Apple locks up Major Sports further expanding its 'Walled Garden'
Fresh off the back of securing content rights to Major League Baseball (MLB), Apple $AAPL has now locked up Major League Soccer (MLS) in the US under a 10 year agreement, from 2023 to 2032.
Apple pitches it as "stream every single MLS match through Apple TV app, without any local blackouts or restrictions".
The issue is of cause, there are very clear restrictions...How about folks that don't have an Apple TV or don't wish to watch through an apple device.
In 2021, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla $TSLA and SpaceX, critized Apple over it's Walled Garden approach to growth:
“I think we want to emphasize that our goal is to support the advent of sustainable energy. It is not to create a walled garden and use that to bludgeon our competitors which is used by some companies.”
Musk has a very good point about Apple's path to growth. Their approach is very simple: use their captive audience and considerable size (and warchest $51b 👀) to lock out competition unless they play by the rules that Apple sets.
Google is probably the most prominent example of a company who have faced continuous law suits in breach of competition laws. This is exactly the path that Apple is on now, and probably has been for a very long time, most notably when Epic Games, the Fornite developer, sued Apple.
I think it's a matter of When not If, Apple faces the same level of scrutiny and anti-competition lawsuits that Google faces today, which will no doubt lead Apple to creating a number of spin off companies.