For all your fantasy football needs, check out the Ringer Fantasy Football Show with me, Danny

Hifetz, and Craig Horlebeck.

That's the Ringer Fantasy Football Show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast.

It is Thursday, August 24th.

If you talk to people in Hollywood, there's a sense that Apple TV Plus, the Apple streaming service, is kind of on the upswing.

Four years after launching, it's got a critical mass of pretty decent shows.

I love Blackbird and Severance.

It's got one massive hit in Ted Lasso, though that's ended.

And they're ramping up original films and animation.

And starting this year, it began a

10-year, $2.5 billion deal with Major League Soccer, the U.S. Soccer League, to air games and sell

a season pass package. That coincided with maybe the world's biggest soccer star, Lionel Messi,

signing an innovative deal with the Miami team that actually gives him a small

share of the Apple economics. Apple CEO Tim Cook boasted on his most recent earnings call that the new

MLS package is, quote, beating our expectations in terms of subscribers. That's very vague, but at least

it shows he's paying attention. That's in part due to messy, of course.

But people in the business sometimes forget that Apple TV Plus is still really small in terms of reach.

15 million subscribers in the U.S., according to analysts, about one-sixth the size of Netflix here, smaller than Peacock.

And a lot of people don't even know it exists.

We did a brand study at Puck,

and Apple TV Plus came in near last in all the categories. To broaden that reach for soccer,

Apple's put the games on Fox and Fox Deportes. There was even a messy game last night on Pluto TV,

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