Starting next year, MLB’s national slate of games and events will be spread out across even more networks and platforms. Yesterday, MLB and multiple partners, both old and new, announced a new right deal that will last through the 2028 season and likely set the stage for an even more lucrative deal after that on the backend of the new collective bargaining agreement. The details are numerous, but here’s some of the highlights summed up by Alden Gonzalez:
So if you want to watch all the games, you now need subscriptions to Apple (somehow that Friday night package survived this turnover), Netflix, MLB.TV (now controlled by ESPN – Yuck!), whatever cable or streaming company you use to get “regular” channels like Fox, NBC and TBS, and of course that delightful, always reliable NESN 360 product to watch the Sox games if you live in New England. Do you need to take out a second mortgage yet?
The most concerning piece of this for me is ESPN taking over the MLB.TV platform, which has been the best thing MLB has had going TV wise. Details here are murky (also a bad sign) but it sounds like, for now, people who have it will be grandfathered in with a similar experience in 2026 (probably too quick for the powers that be to truly turn things around). But I’d expect a decline in quality and an increase in price for that service sometime in the next 18 months given the players involved.
All of this follows the path of both the NFL and NBA, which have also spread their inventory across numerous platforms behind multiple paywalls. I guess the only good news about this is that it actually does put pressure on the owners to not have a work stoppage in 2027. With all of these deals (both old like the Fox and TBS stuff, and new like the NBC and Netflix stuff) ending at the conclusion of the 2028, MLB is setting itself up to have its entire inventory for sale at once in just three more years.
Welcome to 2025, where if you’re passionate about anything, you will be financially exploited for it!
Talk about this and whatever else you’d like in this open thread, and as always, be good to one another.
