Sports jocks and computer nerds spent a lifetime at odds with each other. If Wedbush managing director Dan Ives gets his wish they might finally have to get along.
Apple buying ESPN from Disney to accelerate its entry into the global sports media landscape would be a “no brainer,” Ives wrote in an analyst note yesterday. An acquisition, which he estimates would be in the $50 billion range, would make the Apple TV+ streaming service more attractive to subscribers by adding more live sports, the “golden goose” of content. “Cupertino plays chess while others play checkers,” Ives told Fortune in an email.
The deal, he said, “would make a ton of strategic sense” for Apple because it would “gain valuable sports content, major TV rights across each of the major professional and college sports packages, and change the cross-sell opportunities and attractiveness of Apple TV, while putting Apple on the sports map globally.”
ESPN declined to comment for this story. Apple did not return a request for comment.
The speculation about an acquisition comes after Disney CEO Bob Iger floated the idea of selling a stake in ESPN, once the company’s crown jewel. The network is grappling with consumers abandoning their cable subscriptions, which puts its business in danger of a slow decline.
Iger has said he is open to “strategic partners” that could help the company with either distribution or content, he told CNBC in July. Disney is “open minded” about the type of deal it would strike with a third party, or the value the partner might bring—content, distribution, or even just cash. The one imperative for any partner, however, was that they accelerate ESPN’s inevitable transition to streaming. “Taking our flagship ESPN channel direct-to-consumer is not a matter of if, but when,” Iger said on the earnings call earlier this month.
Some of the partners Disney had in mind were the very sports leagues that are broadcast on ESPN. Disney reportedly offered equity stakes in ESPN to NBA, NFL, and MLB, presumably as part of negotiations for their contract renewals.
In buying ESPN, Apple would give its Apple TV+ streaming service a lift. It has a limited amount of content compared to rivals like Netflix and Max and is trailing in market share.
A deal would give Apple access to 74 million cable subscribers and an ESPN+ streaming service that has another 24 million paying customers, according to Disney’s 2022 annual report. Despite a decline in Disney’s ad revenue from cable overall, ESPN’s revenue was up a modest 4% in its latest quarter from the same period a year earlier, and up 2% from the prior quarter, Disney chief financial officer Kevin Lansberry said on the company’s latest earrings call.
So far, Apple has dabbled in sports content, acquiring the broadcast rights for leagues like the MLB and the MLS. With the MLS, Apple landed the league’s global distribution rights rather than national or regional ones that are the standard for live event broadcast rights. Apple also narrowly missed out on a college sports deal with the Pac-12 before a conference realignment earlier this month scuttled its plans at the last minute.
Meanwhile, Disney is already making some changes at ESPN. Earlier this month, it entered into a 10-year, $1.5 billion licensing agreement with the casino and sportsbook operator PENN Entertainment that will allow PENN to use the ESPN brand on all its sports betting assets.
In March, Disney's companywide layoffs of 7,000 hit ESPN as part of a plan to trim $5.5 billion in costs. That was followed earlier this summer by ESPN cutting a raft of high profile on-air talent.
In his note, Ives cites challenges to Apple buying ESPN, including Apple’s long-time reluctance to make major acquisitions. The last time it made a major acquisition was in 2014 when it purchased music headphone maker Beats for $3 billion. At the time, in addition to its headphones, Beats had an upstart music streaming service that was eventually folded into Apple Music.
There’s also the question mark raised by a hawkish Federal Trade Commission, chaired by Lina Khan, who’s made her aversion to tech mergers the foundation of her career. Ives, though, characterizes Khan and the FTC as “bark worse than bite,” implying that regulators are surmountable hurdles rather than outright impediments to a future deal.
Finally, Ives’ prediction of an Apple acquisition runs up against the reality of Iger being thus far unequivocal about Disney’s commitment to sports, making a full sale unlikely. “Sports stands tall in a sea of tremendous choice, and is in many respects an advertiser's dream and consumer's dream,” Iger said in the CNBC interview in July. “We have a unique position and we feel that we should stay in it.”
And in August, Iger reiterated that most of the terms of a possible deal were flexible, except for one: Disney “retain control of ESPN.”
