At Dignity Health Sports Park in Los Angeles on May 23, the visiting Major League Soccer team, the Houston Dynamo, got past the goalie and nearly scored before a defender from the home LA Galaxy kicked the ball away at the last second. Fans at home saw it in a brand-new way: from an iPhone 17 Pro Max positioned right behind the goal. For the first time in major sports history, a professional game was shot entirely with iPhones.
Fifteen iPhones were positioned around the field (all iPhone 17 Pro Max models), eight of which were shooting with their native lenses, like the one behind the goal. The other seven were shooting directly through massive external zoom lenses attached to the iPhones. The zoom lenses were like those folks are used to seeing line professional sports stadiums that let camera operators capture plays from across the field.
There’s were two or three cameras more than typically used in previous games, executive vice president of Media for Major League Soccer Seth Bacon told the media during an on-field preview before the match. But the better value is being able to position iPhones just using their regular lenses in places where large-lens cameras wouldn’t fit, like behind the goals and facing teams on the sideline.
“Those bench cameras you saw, we can’t get cameras that close, usually. What we’ll do is, we’ll shoot across the field to get reaction shots,” Bacon said. “The kind of compactness of the iPhone and being able to put it right there is a big, big step forward for us.”
That proximity to players and coaches could offer fun opportunities for capturing players on the iPhones’ microphones at some point, but for now MLS wants to be considerate of their privacy. And mind the, say, colorful language they may use during heated moments in a game. The iPhones elsewhere on the field are picking up game audio.
Folks watching the game on Apple TV likely couldn’t tell the difference, and that’s entirely the point. It showcases the recording capability of Apple’s phones, suggesting that viewers could shoot footage at the same level of quality with the iPhone 17 Pro Max in their pocket.
“Our native [iPhone 17 Pro Max] lenses, the quality that they’re able to produce is just as good as that from a traditional broadcast,” said Royce Dickerson, executive producer of live sports at Apple. “You won’t be able to tell the difference between the native lens cameras and the cameras with the zoom lens on them.”
It’s not quite so simple for the casual photographer to mimic the footage of those broadcasts, as the external lenses it’s captured with are expensive. Apple declined to say how much they cost, but they looked just like the Fujinon Duvo 25-1000 Cinema Box Lens that was announced with a launch price of $265,000, according to YMCinema. Then the footage is run through Blackmagic video processing software. Consumers can get their own version with the company’s Blackmagic Camera iOS app.
Around the field ahead of the game, I saw one of these mounted camera setups piloted by an experienced camera operator. Sitting in a gimbaled chair with precision controls, he smoothly angled the camera up and down, zoomed in and out and rotated side to side in practice for shooting action footage during the game. It looked a lot like I’ve seen camera operators perform at other pro sports events — but in place of an expensive-looking camera receiver, the lens was locked onto an iPhone in a mount.
As the teams filtered onto the field in the minutes before the game, I clocked other cameras around the field, thinking about all the footage coming from all of the iPhones. Then I saw where it’s all spliced together into a single broadcast.
In the room where an iPhone pro sports broadcast is made
The 15-iPhone setup gathering footage is set up to minimize footage delays from video shot on the field to viewers watching the Apple TV game at home. Each iPhone 17 Pro Max was shooting video in 1080p at 60 frames per second, which is routed from the phone through a USB-C to HDMI cable into a converter connected to fiber cable that winds its way to the broadcast center. From there, it’s treated like any other footage, managed by a big team that sends it out into the world to reach viewers’ screens.
Like any other sports event, the footage was collected and assembled in real-time inside a broadcast center. In the LA Galaxy’s home stadium’s case, the center is a portable headquarters that can be pulled by a semi-truck, parked deep under the fan seats in the bowels of Dignity Health Sports Park.
I walked into the broadcast center to find a cramped setup with three rows of switchboards and screens, all angled toward a master wall of displays showing everything shot by the 15 iPhones at once. Around a dozen people sat in front of these boards, overseen by a headset-wearing supervisor rattling off directions. As the countdown began to the broadcast’s start, the chatter buzzed into a hive of coordination, switching from one camera to another as I watched footage from all the iPhones I’d seen on the field get carefully spliced together in real-time.
As Bacon told us, the broadcast center was handling the game just like it had for any other MLS game — the only difference was that the footage coming in was from phones you could buy off the shelf. While some were captured through very expensive external lenses, they were initially processed by a $1,200 phone.
“The fact that you can use what’s in your pocket — the iPhone 17 Pro Max — to go shoot your kid’s soccer game, you’re gonna get the great broadcast quality that you could using professional-grade equipment with a consumer readily available device,” Dickerson said.
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