New Delhi, June 14 -- SAN FRANCISCO - The game tips off at 7 p.m. The meeting starts at 6:45. For millions of fans who live in that particular gap, the question is not whether to watch - that decision was made for them - but how to follow, absorb, and feel connected to something happening without them. The answer, by 2026, is a phone screen. The frustration is that it requires four of them.

each serves a distinct slice of what a fan actually wants, and none has managed to serve all of it simultaneously. What looks like consumer abundance from the outside is, in practice, a negotiation tax on every sports fan who reaches for their phone during a commute, a dinner, or a meeting that ran long.

Apple moved last month to reframe that convers...