I Didn’t Hate Apple’s Immersive MLS Highlights Reel

I just watched the Apple Immersive Video MLS Highlights reel that been talked about… and I didn’t think it was nearly as bad as I expected based on the rhetoric. Sure, there were too many jump cuts that didn’t let me look long enough at any given thing. But I feel like it did a good job of, well, highlighting the capability of immersive video for sports. With all the quick cuts, it almost forced you to look around each scene to see what was going on. Looking around this spatial content is super cool, and it was fine that I had to do it a bunch for this short-form version.

Three other quick notes:

• Given that the rest of the immersive content has been fairly stationary with very few cuts between scenes, I don’t buy that Apple thinks this is the best way to present immersive video. I think it was meant to be exactly what’s on the tin: a highlights reel. (But highlight reels are generally meant to get you excited for the full-length thing. This raises the question, where is the rest of the immersive MLS or other sports stuff that they should have been working on since June?)
• I started playing “Where’s the camera?” and looking around to see if I could find the massive immersive video units like in the Alicia Keys version. I couldn’t pick any out, but I think at least some of that content was captured on an iPhone — I saw someone shooting with an iPhone in the “right” spot for one of the athletes-and-fans-walk-by scenes — which is impressive.
• If Apple didn’t want us all speculating about the existence of more immersive content, then they shouldn’t have labeled them all as “Episode 1”. It makes us think that there should be more, and again, they’ve had since at least June of last year to get more episodes together. These exclusive experiences are the very few things that bring me back to Vision Pro, so I’d like there to be more.