Apple's first season as Formula 1's US broadcast partner has begun with both sides openly framing the deal as a generational play on the American sports market — and according to Apple Services chief Eddy Cue, the only ceiling that matters is the one set by the country's biggest sport.
Cue, who personally championed the F1 push inside Apple, told the audience at a joint Apple-F1 event that the streaming platform is treating the deal as a multi-decade compounding bet rather than a season-to-season ratings race.
"My view is that there's enormous room for growth. This is a much younger audience than almost any other sport," Cue said.
"I don't know how many millions we're talking about, but it's exponential. That's the beauty of it. I think the question is how many times we can multiply that number over the years."
Apple's path is unconventional. It bypassed the traditional linear advertising model that previously underpinned F1's US deal with ESPN, instead bundling the sport into its existing Apple TV subscription and pushing the brand into Apple News, Apple Music F1 playlists, and the company's retail footprint. Cue made no secret of the comparative he is using internally.
"We're not focused on the NFL. There's the NHL, there's Major League Baseball — there are many sports to surpass before getting to the top."
F1 president and CEO Stefano Domenicali, who pushed hard for an Apple deal over a renewed linear partnership, sees the company's role as cultural rather than purely commercial.
"To be truly strong in the United States, you need to become part of American culture," Domenicali said. "Culture means being part of people's everyday lives."
"From a technology perspective, we need to talk about innovation, and we have the best platform and the best partner when it comes to technology."
The distribution muscle behind Apple matters as much to F1's commercial pitch as the headline rights fee. Domenicali pointed to the brand's ubiquity as something a traditional sports network cannot replicate.
"I think they are everywhere, with the right people, at the right scale. And when people talk about Apple, now they will also talk about Formula 1."
The long-term ambition, Domenicali made clear, is for F1 to be discussed in the same breath as the NFL — and for the NFL itself to start watching.
"The fact that we started with Everest, which is the NFL — if in a couple of years the NFL starts noticing us and asking, 'What's happening here?' that would be incredible for us."
The early data points are mixed but tilted in F1's favour. The Miami Grand Prix delivered the largest US F1 audience on record, the F1 movie cleared $600m at the global box office and won an Apple-funded sequel green-light, and Apple's executives confirmed the company intends to repeat the cinematic playbook with documentary and scripted spin-offs.
For F1, the test is whether the Apple ecosystem can convert curiosity into the kind of repeat, multi-platform consumption the NFL enjoys. For Apple, the bet is more strategic: a global sport with a younger demographic, owned in perpetuity by a single rights-holder, plugged directly into hardware Apple already sells. As Cue put it, the only real question is how many multiples the number eventually carries.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/apple-f1-american-market-eddy-cue-domenicali-growth-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
