When the Detroit Tigers visit the Boston Red Sox tonight, Friday Night Baseball on Apple TV+ will close its 2025 season with a milestone: the first use of iPhone cameras as live-broadcast sources in Major League Baseball broadcast history.

The production team will deploy Apple’s new iPhone 17 Pro at four locations around historic Fenway Park: the home dugout, inside the Green Monster, and as a roving handheld. The devices will capture both game action and ballpark atmosphere, providing directors with a new layer of storytelling tools during the telecast.

Inside the production truck, the iPhones will appear as live feeds available to game director Jason Lobb — who is working alongside producer Christopher Bracey — like any traditional hard or handheld broadcast camera. A graphic will appear on screen to alert viewers when a shot is captured by iPhone, but otherwise the workflow is fully embedded into the live show.

The production team spent the season quietly testing the system, including putting a handful of iPhone shots on-air during the San Francisco Giants–Los Angeles Dodgers game last week.

The engineering challenge was ensuring that a device designed for consumers could function within a professional live sports workflow. The iPhone 17 Pro natively shoots in broadcast-friendly frame rates (1080p/59.94), allowing its signal to be converted cleanly into existing production infrastructure. Each device outputs a pristine HDMI feed, which is converted to SDI and carried over fiber into the broadcast truck, where it becomes just another selectable source on the switcher.

The integration is powered by the Blackmagic Camera App. Operators manage exposure, white balance, and zoom remotely via iPads, giving them finer control than a standard smartphone interface would allow. That remote-operation capability was critical in meeting broadcast-quality standards and ensuring consistency in mixing iPhone-sourced shots with the rest of the camera feeds.