Both Ben Thompson and Jason Snell had reservations about Apple’s only immersive video to come out since Vision Pro came out. It is a 5-minute highlight reel of the Major League Soccer Cup and after seeing it myself I kind of disagree with both of them. The video is fine!
There are some limitations of the technology: you can’t have the camera panning around the pitch so you have to be in a fixed position, and a soccer pitch is so vast that there is no way to watch a game from the same spot while being close to the action, while at the same time being close to the action is the whole point of immersion. So, to square that circle Apple, or whomever they chose to produce the video, opted to cut to the most interesting bits of action from the most interesting spots.
I don’t know how much soccer Snell, Thompson and other Apple commentators have seen in their lives but I would wager that it’s not a lot. I am far from being a super-fan, but I’ve seen enough games to know where to look and the cuts in the video were fine — for those who know the game. Moving from spot to spot was logical and it was clear which games you were watching.
But what did Apple intend with this? To have an immersive video for the fans? Or was it a tech demo? Or maybe a vehicle to get more Apple whales — and let’s face it if you own an AVP you are an Apple whale no matter what you tell yourself — to get into MLS? They’re three different things with different tradeoffs and it seems like they went for the fans here first, but how many of them are there who also have a Vision Pro?
Now with basketball you actually can be close to the action and have a good overview of the game, and this is where everyone, fan or not, would probably prefer a single court-side position over quick cuts. So I hope Adam Silver is working on that. I don’t know or watch baseball, but I assume it’s somewhere in between basketball and soccer. At the only baseball game I ever watched I could clearly see every part of the field, I just didn’t know what was going on or where I should look.
The optimal version for every sport would of course be to have a choice between several spots around the court, pitch or field and I do hope we’ll get that for some of the upcoming NBA playoff games. I already have a League Pass and would happily pay extra for the experience.