Apple Broadcasts One Baseball Game In VR. It Is Already Leading The Space. One sample size is a small sample size.
Apple broadcast a Yankees versus Red Sox game in virtual reality, and Sportico's Jacob Feldman reports the company is already considered a leader in the space after a single game. The piece appears in Club Sportico, a newsletter from Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports.
The principle at work is incumbent advantage. Apple enters a niche market with one production and immediately commands the conversation because the brand carries more perceived authority than competitors with years of actual experience. This is the halo effect in business form. The lesson: distribution and brand sometimes matter more than the underlying product quality, at least in the short term.
Sportico, through Jacob Feldman's reporting in the Club Sportico newsletter, covered Apple's VR broadcast of a single MLB game between the Yankees and Red Sox. Sportico is a sports business media company launched in 2020.
- If you own an Apple Vision Pro or have access to one, check the Apple TV app for any available sports content in immersive formats. Expected outcome: You experience the same VR broadcast format Apple used for the MLB game.
- Watch a traditional broadcast of the same sport on a standard television for comparison. Expected outcome: You can identify what VR adds and what it sacrifices.
- Note three things the VR format did better and three it did worse. Expected outcome: You now understand the current state of immersive sports better than most analysts who wrote breathless headlines about it.