While Apple TV first showed that the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max could handle the demands of a live professional sports broadcast during Friday Night Baseball, the company has since expanded its role to Major League Soccer, using smartphones to capture angles that traditional broadcast cameras simply can’t.
Nearly a year after Apple first put iPhone 17 Pro Max units into a live sports streaming workflow, the cameras are back for MLS All-Star Week 2026 in Charlotte, North Carolina. During the Skills Challenge on July 28 and the MLS All-Star Game on July 29, the iPhone 17 Pro Max can be mounted behind goals, attached to Magic Arms (articulated stands commonly used in film and broadcast production), and carried on Ronin gimbals by traveling camera operators. If a penalty is taken, one could even end up just a few meters behind the player taking the kick, offering an even more immersive perspective.
I was in Charlotte this week and met once again with Royce Dickerson, executive producer of Live Sports on Apple TV, to see how the company’s approach has evolved over the past year. For Dickerson, the mission is no longer to prove that the iPhone belongs in a live broadcast, but to discover what broadcasters can do with it that they couldn’t before.
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“We’re always looking for ways to innovate and bring fans closer to the action,” Dickerson told me. “How can we continue to be creative with the spaces we have? Where can we put iPhones that we haven’t thought of before? … We’re always striving for … what’s that perfect shot? I don’t think we’ve found it yet.”
That change in mentality is perhaps the biggest takeaway a year later. Apple is no longer wondering if the iPhone can function as a streaming camera: it’s wondering how many more it can implement and where they can go next.
‘Like another camera’
A year later, no one on Dickerson’s team treats the iPhone as a novelty. He referred to that first broadcast of Friday Night Baseball, when veteran director John Moore ended up cutting to the iPhone shot more often than he expected once he saw the image quality for himself. Camera operators came to the same place, Dickerson told me that once they get familiar with the iPhone, “to them it’s like another camera.”
That convenience is why Apple is running the setup weekly in both MLS and Friday Night Baseball, rather than treating it as a special event. “I don’t think we would be doing it week in and week out in MLS right now and on Friday Night Baseball if everyone wasn’t 100% comfortable with the camera,” he said.
The hardware has also diversified slightly: along with the now recognizable Cosmic Orange units, Apple has also combined some silver cameras from the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
From four iPhones to 15 and finally 30?
Ask Dickerson what he took from that first Fenway broadcast and applied it directly to MLS, and his answer is immediate: they needed more iPhones.
That first game featured four units in total: one in the Pesky Foul Pole, another stuck in the Green Monster, another in a Ronin gimbal, and another in the dugout. Seeing how discreetly that small footprint could be incorporated into a stadium convinced him that the ceiling was much higher than four.
“We need more of them,” he told me. “The small-scale size of that showed me that we can put iPhones anywhere. We need to be able to say, say, let’s put 20: what can we do that’s crazy in a stadium that only provides full 360-degree coverage within a venue?”
That thought has already come true. For a dedicated MLS game, filmed almost entirely on an iPhone, Apple deployed 15 iPhone 17 Pro Max cameras throughout the stadium, and Dickerson doesn’t see that as a limit.
“I see a world where we have 20 iPhones. I see a world where we have like 30,” he said. “With the confidence that everyone has in them now, the scope will start to expand a little more.”
The workflow has caught up with that ambition. What used to take a full day of handling and connectivity checks is now, in Dickerson’s words, about a tenth of the time it took a year ago, simply as a result of doing it week after week and becoming familiar with the process.
Crews still use Beastgrip gear for rigging, but the iPad-based control setup I saw a year ago is gone: camera input and shading are now built right into the truck’s standard drive system, no separate tablet required.
Geometry is a key difference between capturing MLB and MLS
The biggest difference between MLB and MLS comes down to something surprisingly simple: geometry.
A field is the same size in Charlotte as it is in Los Angeles, Miami or New York, and in many football stadiums, the stands reach all the way to the sideline, meaning that an iPhone mounted on a Ronin can get surprisingly close to the development of the game.
Baseball doesn’t offer that flexibility. Foul lines are a difficult boundary, and once you cross the playing field, that’s it, no matter what park you’re in and no matter how the dimensions change from stadium to stadium. Football’s more consistent footprint, along with access to the sidelines, is allowing Apple to bring cameras closer to the action than it could in a stadium.
That proximity has led to locations that wouldn’t be found near a diamond: a Ronin on the sideline for tight shots, an iPhone on the team benches (Dickerson mentioned seeing LA Galaxy head coach Greg Vanney’s face while taking notes on an iPad during a game), cameras hidden in the goal net, in the tunnel and mounted on billboards at field level. None of it blocks a fan’s line of sight, and it’s all small enough to go unnoticed until a broadcast cuts it off.
Dickerson also pointed out a more subtle benefit: Players, coaches and managers react differently to an iPhone than to a traditional broadcast camera.
“Usually they shove a big camera in their face and immediately retreat into themselves,” he said. “But suddenly there’s just an iPhone 17 Pro Max on a gimbal… and that relieves them a little bit.”
That reaction is helping Apple capture more intimate, unguarded moments without interrupting gameplay or fans’ views.
What to look for in Charlotte
Tuesday’s Skills Challenge was heavily mobility-based with Ronins in the stadium, two of them in RF for full remote control, plus two more mounted on Magic Arms positioned for close, organic angles of flying balls and running players.
Wednesday’s All-Star Game mixes up two Ronins pushed to the side, along with iPhones placed around the halftime stage for Ciara’s performance (produced by a separate team that Apple’s broadcast will feed into).
Dickerson’s dream shot for the All-Star Game: an iPhone mounted on a Ronin getting a tight angle behind a player on a penalty kick, a shot that’s essentially impossible with a traditional camera.
I’ll be keeping an eye out for that moment during the game, because if Apple can pull it off, it may be one of the clearest examples yet of why these little cameras are changing what’s possible in a live stream.
I’m still looking for the perfect photo
Twenty years into his television career, Dickerson isn’t interested in claiming victory. He pointed to a shot from MLB’s first official iPhone game, when Ceddanne Rafaela captured a tee shot from a phone at the Pesky Pole, as one of the closest things his team has ever captured to a perfect shot, but he’s clear it’s not the goal line.
The goal, as he put it, is to find angles that no one has thought to try yet, in stadiums that all start to look the same until you walk around them looking for a spot no one has used before.
With Apple already talking about a “year and a half” of testing and implementation behind this heading into the upcoming MLS season and Friday Night Baseball campaign, Dickerson promises more of what brought Apple here in the first place: more iPhones, more unconventional angles, and the continued insistence that the phone in your pocket can shoot alongside, and sometimes replace, a six-figure broadcast camera.
Apple TV in the United States is the streaming home of the MLS, and you can watch it for free as it is included in one of the best streaming services. The MLS All-Star Game will begin at 8 pm ET tonight, July 29, 2026, with a pre-show starting earlier, and it will be easy to tell when they call for a shot from the iPhone thanks to the “Shot on iPhone” error visible on the screen.
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