Major League Soccer Adds Featured Sunday Night Soccer Match to Apple TV+; Expands Availability of MLS Season Pass to Xfinity, DIRECTV; Centralizes Graphics Workflow

Major League Soccer Adds Featured Sunday Night Soccer Match to Apple TV ; Expands Availability of MLS Season Pass to Xfinity, DIRECTV; Centralizes Graphics Workflow League also makes key hires to bolster live match and studio productions By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital

Thursday, January 30, 2025 - 2:56 pm

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In their third season as partners, Major League Soccer and Apple are making some notable changes to the league's media production and distribution strategy.

During an online media event on Wednesday, the pair shared plans to produce a featured match of the week on Sunday nights (available to stream for free to Apple TV subscribers), increased availability of MLS Season Pass (the league's live match subscription package) on Xfinity and DIRECTV, and made notable moves in its behind-the-scenes production and operations of live match coverage, including establishing a centralized graphics workflow.

To begin with distribution, MLS Season Pass will broadcast a featured game of the week on Sunday evenings called Sunday Night Soccer. This match will prioritize high-profile matchups and feature enhanced production and dedicated studio programming, as well as custom English and Spanish language graphics. Sunday Night Soccer will be available to stream free for Apple TV subscribers. MLS Season Pass is an added purchase on top of an Apple TV subscription. The first edition of Sunday Night Soccer will stream on February 23 and feature the defending MLS Cup champion LA Galaxy facing the league's newest expansion franchise, San Diego FC.

Also, MLS is bringing MLS Season Pass outside of Apple TV exclusivity for the first time since partnering with Apple. This season, the subscription service will be available for purchase to both Comcast's Xfinity and DIRECTV customers.

As previously reported, MLS has moved its media- and broadcast-production arm, MLS Productions, to WWE headquarters in Stamford, CT. The move is part of a multiyear partnership renewal with IMG that expands and builds upon an existing broadcast-production relationship. IMG will continue to produce live match and studio productions and programming for more than 600 games annually on MLS Season Pass on Apple TV; NEP Group will handle production facilities and technology.

With five fully equipped studios and cutting edge virtual production technology, this facility will elevate the production quality of MLS Season Pass to new heights, says Ignacio Garcia, SVP and Executive Producer for Major League Soccer. [It will] enhance virtual capabilities, will provide equity and content quality between English and Spanish broadcast. Spanish speaking fans can now enjoy their favorite shows in studios that match the high quality of our English language productions.

At MLS Productions, we are very passionate about bringing the best practices in global soccer to America, Garcia continues. IMG brings in top tier production staff ensuring we continue to raise the bar. They come from a variety of backgrounds and bring an array of skills that will elevate both the quality and volume of content we produce throughout the 2025 season.

It was noted that IMG's Director of Content Stephen Cook has been brought it to oversee all media production along with veteran match director Tony Mills, who was a director at Sky Sports from 1991 to 2017 and famously directed the first-ever match in the English Premier League on television in 1992, as well as the first-ever Premier League match in high-definition in 2006. Additional, IMG and MLS have elevated Greg Burud to oversee all studio production for MLS Season Pass on Apple TV. He was a coordinating producer for MLS Season Pass' studio programming last season and was previously a producer at ESPN for a more than a decade.

MLS will also be centralizing its graphics workflow in the Stamford facility. That's a change from previous seasons where graphics were generated from the production truck for distribution. From a presentation persepctive, this is advantageous for MLS as it allows for easier customization of live graphics and inserts in multiple languages during games.

This is about quality and consistency, said Seth Bacon, EVP, Media, Major League Soccer. If you think about the way we did it in the past, what we packed our graphics engines up after every match and shipped them to the next [match]. They get shipped around when we show up, you would get a graphics operator who may have worked the baseball game the day before. The inconsistency in the technology and in the operators is what we were trying to solve for. By having everything [in Stamford], we have dedicated hardware that's in a completely controlled environment, we can be doing the updates throughout the week, and on match day we're ready to go. That is an investment in quality. It's not anything about how we try and do it in a different way or a more efficient way. It's about how do we do it in a smarter way that drives quality.

AE Live, the league's graphics partner, has hired dedicated full-time graphics operators for MLS.

Bacon also noted that MLS would be utilizing NEP VISTA's South Florida facility to add some remote (REMI) match productions to the lineup. That's a departure from the first two years of the Apple deal where every match production was handled by a truck on site. These REMI matches would have production personnel and announcers working off site of the match venue.

This is about how we can invest in resources, but importantly invest in technology. That technology unlocks new ways to do things. [REMIs will] be a limited number of games; a subset of what we do. The overwhelming majority of our games will still be produced onsite and the way that we've produced it the last two years.

The Major

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2025/01/30/major-league-soccer-adds-featur...
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