As Major League Baseball crafts its local TV future and regional sports cable networks fizzle out, the league is reportedly exploring a deal for its MLB.tv out-of-market game service.
According to Andrew Marchand of The Athletic, MLB hopes to license the service to a major network or streaming platform. Commissioner Rob Manfred has set a loose deadline of 2028 by which he hopes to combine a majority of teams’ live local rights together to sell them to a streamer, and this would appear to be a major step toward that goal.
The move also creates another item that MLB can sell between now and 2028, when its TV deals with Fox and TNT Sports end. After a recent “mutual” opt-out with ESPN, the league has been shopping a package including Sunday Night Baseball, the Home Run Derby and the Wild Card round of the postseason. Now, it can include MLB.tv in those discussions.
As of 2025, MLB.tv offers live viewing of all 30 teams’ games for out-of-market fans. It also offers exclusive live rights to 10 teams’ in-market games following the dissolution of several local regional sports cable networks in recent years.
Such a deal would figure to increase MLB’s reach and revenue. By licensing the entire package to a platform like ESPN+ (which the NHL did in 2021), or Amazon’s Prime Video, MLB would be able to make the platform available to a broader audience. At the same time, MLB can retain production and technical control, something it has long been an industry-leader in since creating MLB Advanced Media in 2000.
Long-term, the league’s goal is to host live, in-market rights exclusively through MLB.tv for every team. That would take baseball out of the RSN business completely, but is a long-shot in the short-term. While RSNs are shrinking as more Americans cut the cable cord, big-market clubs like the Yankees and Dodgers place high value on their local TV deals. It may be a while before the economics make sense for those clubs to bundle with the rest of MLB to sell their in-market rights.
Still, the league is getting a head-start on the experiment by putting MLB.tv up for auction now. One would expect that an initial licensing deal would be shorter, perhaps to align with the 2028 expiration of the Fox and TNT deals. But this move marks the beginning of a new era for watching baseball.
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