Evercore analyst Amit Daryanani is really stoked about Apple’s Friday Night Baseball announcement. That’s the one that’ll give Apple TV+ subscribers two, live Major League Baseball games every Friday night during the regular season, plus a lot of other baseball related content.
Benzinga (via Yahoo Finance) has been through Daryanani’s thoughts on the announcement, stripped out most of the words, and posted his thinking as bullet points. Basically, what he thinks people get wrong about Apple TV+ is their assumption that Apple wants Apple TV+ to be Netflix. Most of the criticism of the Cupertino-streamer is “rooted in misunderstanding Apple's actual intentions,” reads the post. According to Benzinga, Daryanani continues:
…to see TV+ as an excellent way to further Apple's goal of monetizing its installed base, which could eventually help shrink replacement cycles for hardware and provide a “potential killer app” for AR/VR.
Daryanani has an “Outperform” rating on Apple shares. His price target on the shares is $210.
Baseball on Apple TV+: Now with a Start Date!
Good news, by the way, for baseball fans, Apple fans, and for Apple: Friday Night Baseball on Apple TV+ has a start date. Apple’s baseball announcement last week was kind of funny. It said that the service would be available “as soon as the regular season begins.” As a piece from iDownloadBlog explains:
When that announcement was made by Apple, (…) MLB and MLB Players Association were still in a pretty heated labor dispute, which had already led to the delay of Spring Training games.
In other words, when Apple made the announcement last week, it wasn’t 100-percent that there would be a baseball season to watch. They’ve settled their dispute, though. And on Friday, the piece says, “the official Apple TV+ Twitter account confirmed (…) Friday Night Baseball will start streaming on Friday, April 8, 2022.”