Australian Grand Prix viewership on Apple TV reportedly beat last year’s ESPN audience

I know people will refuse to believe this, but I covered Apple as a journalist for five years, then bought stock and continued covering Apple as a biased investor for a decade, and one thing I can promise you is that Apple does not lie about hard data to the media. If they had gotten twice as many viewers as ESPN did a year ago, they would have said that, so it’s perfectly sensible to interpret “more” to mean “at least one more” in this case. But the other thing they said is that the performance exceeded “both F1 and Apple expectations,” so it’s time to accept that this U.S. broadcast deal is working.

Lots of people rushed to predict that moving onto a streaming service would tank Formula 1’s ratings in the U.S., but I don’t think those people quite appreciate how many people there already are in Apple’s ecosystem — and how good of new Formula 1 fans those people make. I expect the move to Apple TV to dramatically accelerate Formula 1’s popularity here, and I expect people who have gripes about it to get over it.