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Through the years, Cue has joked that sports activities had been the one factor he was “smarter than Steve” about (as in Jobs). And, with time, he’s grow to be one thing like the corporate’s sports activities ambassador. Earlier this 12 months, I clocked Cue on the Tremendous Bowl in Arizona, in February, after which on the Miami Grand Prix, in Could. At house, he’s acquired 9 televisions arrayed in a grid, plus a digital ticker relaying scores—the form of sports-viewing system you’d dream up if you happen to had been a wildly profitable, sports-mad tech government. He’s grow to be a courtside fixture at Warriors video games. His real love is the lads’s basketball crew at Duke, his alma mater. (In a humorous means, that’s due to the altering tides of sports activities broadcasting, too: Cue, who grew up in Miami, didn’t know a lot concerning the college till 1978, when its hoops crew performed nicely sufficient to make it into the nationally televised portion of March Insanity.)
At work, he was generally capable of put his data to make use of. Years in the past, he was excited to chop a cope with the NBA to promote recordings of Finals video games on the iTunes Retailer. Extra just lately, he helped dream up Apple TV’s “Shut Sport” notification, the alert that tells you while you’re lacking a carefully contested end. However for essentially the most half, Cue’s day job solely hardly ever intersected along with his id as a sports activities fan. This was thanks, partly, to the best way Apple goes about issues: the corporate famously will get into a brand new line of enterprise by itself phrases, and the world of dwell sports activities is especially resistant to vary.
That’s one of many causes, Cue instructed me, why he by no means anticipated to get into enterprise with Main League Soccer within the first place. There’s principally one technique to begin airing sports activities, and it didn’t enchantment to Cue, or to Apple. “For those who attempt to do a cope with nearly all the pieces that is on the market, it is doing the very same deal that has existed for the final 20 years: Decide a sport, choose a set of video games, and choose a area. And that is actually all that is been on the market. It is all the identical,” he mentioned. CBS pays the NFL to broadcast a handful of video games on Sundays, whereas Amazon pays for sole possession of Thursday nights. “I knew we did not need to try this,” Cue mentioned. “I used to be constructive: we’re not going to get within the recreation of enjoying right here if we now have to play by these guidelines.” Past that, Cue was solely concerned with a deal that may permit Apple to affect “how you can current [the game], ship it, and use know-how.” Apple wasn’t simply in search of a sport to air—it wished a sport that was open to being modified by Apple.
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