Apple has sealed a five-year exclusive deal to broadcast Formula 1 in the United States, starting from the 2026 season. This will move all US coverage of the championship to Apple TV as the tech giant seeks to continue its push into live sport. But this partnership won't just affect where Americans watch races, but also how they experience them.
After immense success with the F1 movie, Apple seeks to continue building on the camera and other technologies used in the production to provide improvements to its broadcasting of the championship, including that of VR technology. Using the movie as a sandbox, Apple’s senior vice president of services Eddy Cue teased further integration.
“We’ve had, over the course of making the movie, from the teams, the drivers, the fans, this cutting-edge technology, the innovation, everything about it, we think is a perfect marriage of Apple TV and Formula 1 being the exclusive provider.
"We are very excited about the plans that we have to elevate this. We've got a lot of great ideas that we're going to work on together, and I think we're going to make this an amazing, transformative year for Formula 1 and Liberty in 2026 so thank you Stefano [Domenicali] and thank you Ian [Holmes] and the rest of the F1 team."
Ian Holmes, chief media rights and broadcast officer at F1, teased further technologies that the two parties are looking to explore, including AR and VR.
“When we talked about the different Apple services and what the deal could become or evolve into, it’s not just from that sort of different service situation. We’ve already spent time, as Eddy said during the filming of the movie, looking at new camera technologies, which ultimately help us create a better product.
"Clearly, there’s certain AR and VR opportunities that we can explore. So it’s very much a relationship across technology as it is content.”
He continued: "What we see in Apple is their capability to offer the sort of 360-degree offering. The live, let's call it the linear here, the live, in-race, in-session coverage will be second to none. It'll be more sophisticated and offer more variety and content than has ever been available in America.
"But then, outside of that being a streaming service as well, it's going to be able to be always on. There's always going to be Formula 1 content. It's going to be available. We talk about watchers and followers. Watcher being someone that perhaps sits in the live race and sits there for two hours and will enjoy an incredibly immersive and technically advanced offering.
"But perhaps the followers, perhaps a slightly lighter viewer maybe wants to dip in and dip out, consuming it on different types of content in different formats. And to have that all sat in one home, if you like, with Apple, we feel really makes the difference to how we grow and be relevant and accessible to the broadest possible audience."
Apple intends to fully mobilise its full ecosystem around the championship, according to Cue.
"We're going to bring everything that Apple has to offer, from our retail stores to all of our apps, including our sports app, podcasting, music, obviously Apple TV, books, all of the capabilities of our websites, Apple news, we have so many touch points that we have with our customers, and we're going to bring the brunt of that, like we did with the movie, to the races and qualifying."
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