Examining Eddy Cue’s Media Blitz
Today's Above Avalon Daily update includes the following story:
Examining Eddy Cue’s Media Blitz
Happy Friday. Over the past few months, Apple SVP Services Eddy Cue has sat down for a decent number of media interviews. Cue is one of the most influential and powerful executives within Apple (among the top three). Over the summer, the “F1 The Movie” release required Apple to go on the PR offensive. More recent interviews have been aimed at drawing attention to some of Apple’s services, like Apple Music Classical, in addition to Apple’s sports play and broader ambitions found with Apple TV (recently rebranded from Apple TV+). Today’s update will be dedicated to going over the most important takeaways from the interviews.
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Eddy Cue on Apple’s Sports Strategy, Apple’s Challenges With Sports, Meta Layoffs Hit Custom Silicon Unit
Hello everyone. Let's jump right into today's discussion.
Eddy Cue on Apple’s Sports Strategy
In a 3,900-word GQ Sports profile titled “Inside Apple’s Plan to Change the Way We Watch Sports,” here’s Sam Schube:
“The man leading Apple’s push into the wild, lucrative world of live sports broadcasting is Eddy Cue. Cue has worked at Apple since 1989, and cuts an interesting figure at a company defined by its low-key, minimalist culture. He is plainspoken, and quick to joke. He is also an enormous sports fan, frequently popping up at the biggest games on the planet. Perhaps most importantly, he is the guy Apple has tasked with an increasingly important piece of its future: as the senior vice president of the company’s services division, his portfolio includes just about everything Apple sells that isn’t a piece of hardware…
One critical part of Cue's portfolio is Apple TV+, the company’s entrant in the streaming wars. And in this war, sports have emerged as a vital weapon. In our ever-more-fractured entertainment landscape, live sports represent perhaps the last best way for distributors—both tech companies like Apple and cable stalwarts like ESPN—to convene a large, reliable audience. Per Nielsen, 94 of the 100 most-watched US TV broadcasts in 2022 were sporting events, with NFL accounting for 82 of those, and 19 of the top 20.
It is Cue’s belief that sports represents an enormous opportunity for the company—and that, with a few tried-and-true Apple tweaks, the right sport can be made to feel more like a rounded-edges, design-forward Apple product. ‘We spend a lot of money, a lot of time on finding the best unscripted drama in the world. That's what we try to create in some of our shows that we do for TV+,’ he told me in the first of a few conversations this spring and summer. ‘Sports is that in spades. It's the greatest unscripted drama there is.’”
GQ offers the most in-depth look to date into Apple’s thinking regarding live sports programming. Much of this is due to the writer relying on Apple’s $2.5B 10-year deal with MLS (U.S. soccer) for examples of how Apple is approaching sports. The article, somewhat inadvertently, also raised some warning signs regarding Apple’s sports play. We will get to those shortly.
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