MLS and Apple announce the price of their new streaming package

Major League Soccer and Apple TV unveiled more details about their new streaming platform, headlined by the price.

The base cost will be $14.99 per month or $99.99 per season. Existing AppleTV+ subscribers get a discount, $12.99 per month or $79 per season.

Fans will get a lot of live content for the money. The package will include every game in the regular season, the playoffs, the new Leagues Cup with MLS and Mexican teams, and the MLS Next PRO reserve team league; plus on-demand replays, highlights, and other content.

The most anticipated addition is a whip-around show with live highlights of every game in the main prime time broadcast windows on Saturdays and Wednesdays.

Notably, there will be no local blackouts, a big boost for cord-cutting fans who couldn’t watch games on local cable channels. That wasn’t an issue in recent years in Philadelphia, because Union games were on local free-to-air channel PHL17 and streamed locally on the team’s website. But it was a big deal in other cities including New York, Denver, Houston, Atlanta, and Minneapolis.

Going forward, games won’t be on local TV anymore — just Apple’s platform and a few broadcasts on traditional national TV. Those deals are expected but haven’t been confirmed yet.

» READ MORE: Apple TV becomes the new home of Major League Soccer with a 10-year deal for every game

All of this said, the up-front cost to fans is a significant amount of money. ESPN+, the previous home of MLS’s out-of-market live streaming, costs $10 a month and has a lot more content: Germany’s Bundesliga and domestic cup, Spain’s La Liga and domestic cup, England’s FA Cup, and a wide range of other sports.

A season-long MLS package will cost around the same amount as 10 months of ESPN+ costs.

The discount for AppleTV+ subscribers is a good deal if you already have the service. AppleTV+ starts at $6.99 per month, and the company offers many deals with its other subscriptions for music, cloud storage, fitness programs, gaming, and news.

Coincidentally, when MLS last ran its own streaming package in 2017, the annual price was $79.

Reactions among fans were mixed. This reporter and others got a deluge of responses on Twitter, spanning the full spectrum of approval and disapproval.

Some number of games still to be announced will be available for free on Apple’s platform, and a further set will be available for Apple TV+ subscribers without needing the extra subscription. Apple did the same thing this year for its live Major League Baseball games.

The 2023 season will start on Feb. 25. Every game that weekend will be available for free, headlined by the Los Angeles Galaxy-LAFC game at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. The full 2023 schedule will be announced in mid-December.

» READ MORE: Philadelphia helped MLS Cup draw its biggest U.S. TV audience in 25 years

MLS said almost all games will be on Saturdays or Wednesdays, with 7:30 p.m. local time kickoffs at the home team’s field. Every broadcast will have an English and Spanish broadcast, plus a French broadcast for Canadian teams (CF Montréal, Toronto FC, and the Vancouver Whitecaps), and there will be pregame and other studio coverage on the Apple platform.

Some games will be on other days or times due to venue conflicts, or for national TV — though MLS still hasn’t secured new deals yet.

MLS has touted that season ticket-holders of the Union and every other team will get free passes for the service. But the official language has a major catch.

A page on the league’s website touting the service says: “One subscription access code per paid full-season ticket account, regardless of the total number of full-season tickets on the account. Only the full-season ticket account owner can receive this benefit as verified through the account owner’s name, mailing address, email address, and payment information attributable to the account owner.”

That means someone who purchases four season tickets in a package — for a family or a group of friends, for example — would only get one free access code, and the other three people would have to pay up. It’s not known yet if Apple’s family sharing plan would help with that.

Apple will have MLS rights for 10 years and is paying $250 million plus per year in the deal. Signups for the new service will start on Feb. 1.