Apple is considering a bid for U.S. rights to golf’s Open Championship

Apple has held preliminary discussions with the R&A about bidding for U.S. rights to golf’s Open Championship, The Guardian reported this week. NBC and Versant — which runs Golf Channel — still hold the American package through 2028, a 12-year run that began when NBC outbid ESPN in 2017. The formal tender is expected early in 2027. Netflix and Amazon are also expected to look.

That is not a done deal, and the R&A said as much. A spokesman called the NBC–Versant partnership excellent for the Open, the AIG Women’s Open, and other championships, and said the governing body expects to talk with those incumbents in due course while watching the wider market. Apple is one more name in a rights process that has not opened yet.

The story is less about a Claret Jug on Apple TV and more about what Cupertino still believes live sport can do. A source familiar with Apple’s plans told The Guardian the company remains committed to sports rights and will keep hunting for the right properties. That sentence lands differently after the last two years of Apple’s sports ledger.

MLS was the long bet. The original 10-year, roughly $2.5 billion global streaming deal was supposed to run into the early 2030s. Both sides later agreed to shorten it so the partnership ends after the 2028–29 season — about three and a half years early — while folding Season Pass into the main Apple TV subscription and reshaping payments. Viewing numbers never looked like a breakout. Commissioner Don Garber said in 2025 the service was averaging about 120,000 unique viewers per match, up year over year, and still conceded the league was not where it needed to be. Soft audience, shorter runway, higher near-term cash for MLS: that is the revised picture.

Formula One was the expensive counterweight. Apple’s five-year U.S. exclusive, starting with the 2026 season, is widely reported around $750 million total — about $150 million a year, a clear premium on ESPN’s prior fee. Every practice, qualifying, Sprint, and Grand Prix rides inside a standard Apple TV subscription, with some races and all practices free in the app. It is a prestige, high-growth property with a movie halo and a younger, affluent U.S. base Apple can sell devices and services to. It is also a bet that weekly appointment viewing can still be built on a streamer if the sport is already hot.

The Open would be a different animal. One major week a year, links golf from the UK in morning American windows, an older and wealthier audience than Drive to Survive’s F1 crowd, and a brand that already lives on NBC and Golf Channel. Streamers like that kind of tentpole because it looks like appointment content without 34 weeks of inventory. Governing bodies like the money. What neither side has proved is patience: how many seasons of middling uniques a tech company will fund before the next renegotiation shortens the story.

Apple still streams Friday Night Baseball doubleheaders. It just bought five years of F1. It is already rewriting the MLS exit. Talking to the R&A about the Open is not a finished sports strategy. It means Cupertino is still shopping for properties that might work — and that the Open’s next U.S. rights fight in 2027 will test whether traditional golf TV or a streamer’s balance sheet wants that week more.