All right, we are at a racing event, and I and others have reported that Apple is on the verge of acquiring F1 live rights. So I'm just giving you the floor here. Is there an announcement you'd like to make?
No, but we do love F1. You know, we've done the movie, and I've been a huge fan of F1 since I've been a kid. Huge, huge fan.
All right. Well, let's hypothetically assume that Apple is acquiring the rights to F1. It would be an epic troll, by the way, if you were here and then you didn't do that in front of the racing audience. But let's say this: look, we just saw the clip of the Apple movie. How has your relationship with F1 evolved over the years?
I think it started when I was about 10 years old. You know, I grew up in Miami, and when you're 10 years old, as old as I am, Formula One races were not on television here in the US. But I went to the library and I discovered this magazine called AutoWeek, and there was a page in AutoWeek, and every one of their issues, the magazine came out weekly, and there was a page in there about F1. And so that's how I discovered the sport. I grew up always loving cars, and Ferrari was really good at that time. So I was a big Ferrari fan, because that's what you read, and that's how it all started. And over time, I was very lucky to be a part of—I'm on the board of Ferrari. I've been there for a long time, and so I got the insider view of Formula One from that point of view. Then we had the opportunity to build the movie. Knew Lewis, having Lewis involved in the movie, I knew was going to make it really epic, from a real point of view. I think one of the challenges when you're trying to do something like this is, how do you make it real? And one of the things that I don't think people appreciate as much is what incredible athletes Formula One drivers are. What it takes to race. When you watch on television, it kind of looks like they're on a Sunday drive. You can't feel the G-force. You can't do that. So we started working on technology with Formula One to put the cameras and the cars in the right place. So when you watch the movie, it feels like you're actually in—what does it feel like to be in a Formula One car? And I think it definitely did that. The attention to detail in the movie is incredible. Thanks to Lewis. I always say everything that happened in that movie has happened in a race. There's nothing in there, including—everybody jokes around, oh, like you may—you put that—if you haven't seen the movie, please go see it. But hopefully you have. It's the biggest sport movie of all time, by the way, Brad Pitt's biggest movie of all time. But there's a scene in there at the end where there's a red flag, and that's how he's, you know, he can win the race. And everybody's like, oh, that's crazy. That would never happen. Well, that's how Max Verstappen won a world championship. So I've had a lot of history with Formula One. And Stefano, who's the CEO of Formula One, is a very, very dear friend. I knew him back when he was working at Ferrari, and then later on at Lamborghini, and now at Formula One. So I have a long history with it.
Yeah. The takeaway from the movie for me was, there are so many different ways to game this sport that, you know, there's so many loopholes in it that, you know, maybe everyone wants to, like, clear up some of that. It was sort of poking at it, I thought, a little bit too. But look, assuming again that the reporting is correct and that you're about to spend, let's say, 140, 150 million dollars per year on F1, there wasn't long ago that F1 rights sold for, like, I think it was 4 million maybe 12 years ago, to NBC. Where has all the value come from? It's not all Drive to Survive.
No. Look, I think in the US, everyone talks about how big Formula One is now. And the reality is, is because it was nowhere. And so if you're nowhere, it's gotten huge. But the truth is, it's not huge yet. It's only about a million people or so that watch a given race. That's right. And so when you compare it from a sports point of view, that's pretty tiny. So there's a huge potential for the sport. And when you look at it, it's a sport that's global. It's the only sport in the world that I can recall where the actual events take place everywhere in the world, not in a single place. The athletes, they're incredible athletes. There is, as what they can do, very few other athletes can do. So that's another piece of it. You have these incredible brands. And I love Cadillac coming on board. So you have all these brands of cars that are involved in it. You have these—it's much more than just driving. Now there's a whole social component, culture component. And with the athletes themselves, heck, even the team principals have become, you know, movie stars or TV stars. Now, you know, I was—I know Toto's coming in later. We were having dinner last night in Soho, and he gets stopped all the time for photos. You know, five—and everybody's like, well, go way back. No, no. Like, five years ago, nobody would know who Toto was as he was walking down, you know, Soho. Now every—you know, not everyone, but tons of people do know. So I think there's a huge, huge potential for the sport in the US.
Specifically, what can Apple do to improve the viewing experience? I mean, you've dabbled now. Are there certain lessons you can take from your partnership with MLS, for instance?
Yeah, we learned a lot with Major League Baseball and MLS. I mean, one of the first things, which is kind of obvious, but you'd be surprised if you've never watched a Major League Baseball game or an MLS game on Apple, on our service, the first thing you notice is the quality. And you'd say, well, what do you mean the quality? Or, you know, you're 4K, everybody else is 4K or any of that standpoint, everybody else compresses their video quite a bit. And so when you watch one of our games, you're like, well, wait a second, why does this look better than anything I've ever seen? So when you watch a Major League Baseball game, you've never seen that at that level. So we've done that. We've put cameras in places that have never been—on the umpire. We did one cool thing. We put it on a foul pole with an iPhone. So for the first time ever, a couple months ago, we had the iPhone actually live broadcasting from a baseball game, and we put the iPhone on a, you know, on the foul pole, obviously, you know, you can never put a camera there or other places, and you could not tell. The only way you could tell is because we put a bug on the bottom, saying, hey, this is being broadcast by an iPhone. Imagine why we do that. But so we've done a lot of innovative things, and I think Formula One can do that in spades, because there's so much data that happens in Formula One, there's all the radio broadcasts, there's all the different teams that you want to follow, or drivers, so there's all kinds of capabilities, but it's hard to do today.
How important is the Vision Pro to your desire for sports rights? Because I can certainly imagine a world where you put that device on and somehow, you know, if you're in the car, to some degree, that would revolutionize the viewing experience.
Look, there's a third party. Actually, I think one of the coolest apps that ever happened on Vision Pro was a small developer decided to do this for Formula One. And so what he did is he creates the tracks in three dimensions, and all the cars you can follow on the track. And obviously you've got this whole scene, and then you've got all the videos playing of the cars that you want to follow, the data, and so it gives you this whole experience. Now, obviously it's not being recorded yet in a virtual mode. And so that's right, it'll be the first time—we did this with Brad Pitt. We took one of the laps and put—the cameras are pretty big, so right now, these virtual cameras, you're not going to see them in a race yet, but you'll be able to put them around the track to really, for the first time, actually get even a closer experience as to what does it take to be in a rocket, because the G-force that they take is more than an astronaut takes when they're going up to space. So it's pretty crazy.
Is the partnership between Apple and F1, or even where it could go, based on the linking of high-end branding between Apple and F1, that it seems like there's a natural connection there. And I'm curious if that's the case, does F1 kind of stand alone in the broader scope of more motorsports as something that would be keenly Apple-specific?
Well, I think one of the things that we love about motorsports is the amount of technology involved in it, and obviously Formula One is the epitome of that. So that's a fun thing that ties to us, which is the combination. It's not just technology. There's a human involved in this. You know, we were in this AI space and all of that stuff. But the human part is the key to the whole thing. Max Verstappen is the one who wins the race and Oscar, but at the same time, there's a level of technology that's off the charts, and so that's near and dear to our heart. That's who we are and what we try to do. And so I love that part of Formula One.
I want to talk about Apple's sports strategy a little bit more broadly. You have said that there has never been a better time and never been a worse time to be a sports fan right now. What did you mean by that?
You know, it's never been a better time, because, let's face it, every sport in the world is available in some fashion or another to watch. That wasn't the case, you know, not that many years back. And so that's amazing, right? That we can get access to any sport, and it really doesn't matter. I mean, we can watch the darts championships live. The problem, though, is we all know we can all watch everything, but it's very hard to find. You have to sign up for, you know, 1,200 subscriptions around them. And if you're traveling, you're screwed. And it's crazy. Like, I travel a lot. It's like, I want to watch an NFL game and I'm sitting in London, and it's like, when I want to do that, I have to find a way to subscribe to a thing in London, but I can't really subscribe because I don't have an English credit card to do the Pro. It's just idiotic. So, like, I always thought, like, what's the analogy of that? Well, we, you know, we do a show called The Morning Show, and The Morning Show is filmed here in New York. And so the way we should do that is we should only let people in New York watch The Morning Show. And so it's just—it's not a great experience for customers. And if you're a sports fan, I'm a huge sports fan. I went to Duke, for example. I'm a huge Duke basketball—I want to watch the Duke game. I don't care what channel it's on. I don't care what it is. And, you know, and everyone knows I'm a huge Duke fan. My phone certainly knows I'm a huge Duke fan. And so it's really easy to give it to me, but, you know, it sucks.
So on the subscription front, what is the solution?
Well, look, you know, in a way, we've gone backwards, because you used to buy one subscription, your cable subscription, and you got, you know, pretty much everything they had. Now, like I said, there's so many different subscriptions, so I think that needs to be fixed. You can't ask people to subscribe to, you know. So how do you fix that? You opt into a bundle of streaming services. Look, I don't have all the answers from that standpoint. I think, you know, we fixed it with MLS because—well, sort of, because you're also contributing to the problem right now, if I want to watch MLS, I've got to subscribe to Apple TV. If it was just on ESPN, I wouldn't have to do that. That's right. You know, that's—you got to have some more bundles. From that standpoint, everything being single is a problem. But I think having a single place where there are no blackouts, no matter where you are in the world, anyone can buy it. From that standpoint, you can watch any game. It's easy to switch back and forth. From that standpoint, things—you know, picture-in-picture has been around forever, you know. But it's really hard to do if they let you do it at all, but in most cases, they can't let you do it because of the rights issues. I mean, there's just—this is pretty basic stuff that I think can grow the sport. And I think one of the concerns that you see is, you know, when I was a kid, you were competing against what, you know, I had, you know, five TV channels, or whatever there is from that standpoint. Now, you know, if you're a kid growing up today, and you want people to watch your sport, there's a lot of competition for those eyes. And so I think the bar is really high. And I think if we want people to watch games, and we want all of sports to grow, I think some of these things need to be fixed.
There seems to me to be a little bit of a tension in that. I know your stated strategy with sports is that you want, like the MLS, you want all the rights. You want it globally. You want the whole package. You don't want to compete for just sort of chunks of sports, although that is what you do with baseball.
Yeah, I would say it slightly differently. I think it's okay. You know, there are sports where that's not going to happen, right? Not going to happen anytime soon, exactly. It's not going to happen with basketball. It's not going to happen with football, so it's not going to happen with the NFL. Let's just start with pretty much—let me know, with sports in the US, that's not going to happen. To me, that's a tension, right? But that doesn't mean that a league or a sport could demand its partners to work together, for example, to provide a better experience. Right now, that's not the case, and so I think you have to think outside the box, right? So, yeah, there are certain things that are not going to happen. But again, let's put the sports fan front and center. That's the customer, that's the fan, that's who we're trying to address.
What are they? A little more specific with me, hypothetically, a league needs to force its partners to work together. What do you mean by that?
Access so that you can go from one to the other, blackouts is another one, right? That happens because of that, you know? And so there's a lot of different things, you know, it's—if I want to get you to a better game, from that standpoint, I'm not going to do that if I have to switch from one broadcast to another, but that's in the interests of a sports league. And so I think, you know, I don't have all the answers. I've got ideas, as you can see, but it doesn't really matter. What you want is you want to go and say, what does a sport fan want? So pick a sport, what do you want? And then if you own or you're responsible, then you got to go figure out ways to address that.
So what you're saying is, if you're a league, maybe you sell a package of all of your games together, that type of thing.
