I’ve watched a lot of soccer in my lifetime. I’ve played all over the Southeastern United States when I was younger. My kids now play on travel teams. I’m the president of our local youth rec league with 900 kids a season. So there’s a pretty good chance that if a TV is turned on in our house, there’s a game playing.
Related All that for a reasonable price, with no blackouts. That’s simple, and Apple has showed other leagues and its competitors how things should be done. But as we’ve said before, a great 1080p stream will trump a highly compressed upscaled 4K stream any day of the week. And in this case, that day was the opening day of the 2023 MLS season. Same goes for the 5.1 surround sound, too.
Again, there are a lot of variables here. For what it’s worth, I checked things out on the latest Apple TV 4K box on a several-years-old LG CX OLED TV and on an even-older TCL 6-Series Roku TV , on a gigabit fiber connection. I saw no real difference in picture quality, which is good. Fortunately, soccer isn’t a sport that’s made for TV. It’s not 3 hours of commercials with 25 minutes of football getting in the way. So you get 45 minutes or so of actual play before being subjected to an advertisement. And while Audi has been a major sponsor of MLS for a while now, it was a little jarring to see it as the only commercial sponsor. That’s a minor complaint, though.
It’s also the first of two major changes in the sports media world in 2023. YouTube and YouTube TV this fall will debut their version of NFL Sunday Ticket, which lets fans watch out-of-market games wherever they live.But soccer is not football, and MLS isn’t the NFL. The number of eyeballs is drastically different. Same, too, for the money. MLS Season Pass costs $15 a month or $100 a season if you don’t also subscribe to Apple TV+ . It’s a couple bucks less if you do.