Apple’s F1 Streaming Deal Nears the Checkered Flag
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Apple may be nearing the final stages of its reported deal for US broadcast rights to the Formula 1 franchise, with a report indicating that the company hopes to announce the new partnership during the US Grand Prix later this month.
Amidst the massive success of F1: The Movie, which had an incredibly strong opening weekend and grossed over $600 million by the end of its summer run, Apple hopes to expand its hit film project into a new column in its Apple TV+ live sports offerings. Talks with Liberty Media, which owns the Formula 1 franchise, reportedly began in early July, shortly after the movie’s release, and sources said the deal was Apple’s to lose.
The US broadcast rights to the Formula 1 franchise have been held by Disney’s ESPN since 2018, but they’re up for grabs next year. Apple reportedly submitted a bid worth at least $150 million per year to stream the US races on Apple TV+. That was nearly double what ESPN had been paying — and reportedly too rich for the network’s blood.
“Barring a last-minute change, it looks like Apple […] will have a third sports streaming offering next year,” Business Insider’s Peter Kafka said in July.
In a surprising twist, Puck’s Dylan Byers also reported being told that two of the other usual suspects, Amazon and Netflix, were sitting this one out.
Byers noted in July that only Apple and ESPN remained at the table — a claim later echoed by Puck’s John Ourand, who now reports the deal could be announced during the US Grand Prix in Austin, which runs from Oct 17–19.
The F1 TV Problem
While talks have been ongoing throughout the summer, the sticking point isn’t the money — it’s exclusivity. Formula 1’s own streaming service, F1 TV, offers live races, on-board camera feeds, team radio, full race replays, and an extensive archive of past Grands Prix and documentaries. While the service is available in several countries, Apple considers the US operation a deal-breaker, as Ourand explains:
The main holdup had been a dispute around Formula 1’s streaming service. Apple stuck to its original position that the racing circuit needed to shut down F1 TV in the U.S., and was reluctant to dole out $140 million on rights fees just to have the races carried on another streaming service. Because F1 TV is profitable in the U.S. market, Formula 1 has been hesitant to pull the plug.
John Ourand, Puck
On the flip side, Liberty Media executive Derek Chang told investors and analysts at a JP Morgan conference in May that Formula 1 has been hoping to grow its fan base in the US. Apple could be an ideal partner to make that happen, as it has already demonstrated with its big-budget F1 film, which has rekindled interest in the sport among younger American audiences.
From Brad Pitt to Broadcast Rights
This has also pushed up the value of broadcast and streaming rights, so ESPN would have likely found itself paying more even if Apple hadn’t cut it out by throwing a much larger pile of cash on the table, but it also shows that Apple is committed to Formula 1, as it really pulled out all the stops to make F1: The Movie a success, to the point of building custom iPhone cameras.
It’s enough to make us ponder whether scoring F1 streaming rights was Apple’s plan from the start — or at least something hovering in the back of executives’ minds when it signed the deal with Pitt in early 2022. That’s quite the long game, but the timing also feels too perfect to be a mere coincidence, since this was around the same time ESPN’s four-season deal was extended into 2025.
Sources don’t have any insight into where Apple and Liberty Media have landed on F1 TV in the US, so it will be interesting to see what happens when the deal finally gets announced. It’s unlikely that Apple will let this one go entirely unchallenged, but there may still be some acceptable middle ground. In either case, the deal now seems like a case of “when,” not “if,” and when it does arrive, it will be another big feather in Apple’s cap — and another tentpole for its Apple TV+ sports lineup. It would be the most ambitious sports rights push since it committed to $2.5 billion to acquire Major League Soccer rights in 2022 — which also happened around the same time it signed on Brad Pitt for F1.
