It’s the same mistake. These companies may have trillions of dollars and a lot of smart people, but they miss something about their services.

On Major League Baseball’s Opening Night, Netflix thought we wanted to watch Netflix. Nope, we wanted to watch baseball: the Yankees vs. the Giants. It happened to be on Netflix. It’s that simple.

It was the first game of the 2026 season and the inaugural exclusive MLB game on the service. For MLB and Netflix, it was a bit of celebration to have the league and such a powerful media player together.

Good for them. But fans don’t care.

Executives of all stripes will feed you some pablum about bringing in new audiences. But that is what a platform does, not the presentation. From a business perspective for MLB, it is a good thing for them to be on Netflix, because it has a huge subscription base of more than 300 million globally.

However, what Netflix missed was it was just picking up the story of MLB. A new season starts another chapter, but it is an old book.

The best part of the Netflix presentation was Matt Vasgersian on play-by-play. He may not have been Netflix’s first choice, but he was a good choice. He is a baseball lifer and next to the likable CC Sabathia and Hunter Pence — when they focused on the game — it was pretty good. The fact the game was a 7-0 Yankees domination didn’t give the trio much strategy to talk about.

Their one blemish was their interview with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred in the fifth inning. While we weren’t expecting Frost-Nixon, there was plenty of stuff to ask besides finding out that Manfred’s first Opening Day was at Shea Stadium in the late 1980s as an MLB lawyer. There was no news.

The reason Opening Night was on Netflix is part of the ongoing disruption of the traditional way we watch sports. Netflix bought the rights to Opening Day, the Home Run Derby and the “Field of Dreams” game for $50 million per season on a three-year deal.

Netflix put together a pretty impressive on-air lineup for the game. Besides Vasgersian, Sabathia and Pence, it had Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols and Anthony Rizzo joining Elle Duncan on the pregame show.

Bonds was the headliner and wasn’t bad — even smiling a few times. During a half-inning appearance late in the game, he told a story about hanging up the phone on the late George Steinbrenner, which led him to spur the Yankees for the Giants as a free agent in 1993.

So there were some highlights, but Netflix was a little out of focus. We like “Stranger Things” on Netflix. MLB is nicknamed, “The Show,” and the game should have been the center of everything.

We didn’t need Netflix comedian Bert Kreischer yelling, “This is baseball!” on the field at the start. We didn’t need introductions with dancers on taxi cabs for the Yankees or trolley cars for the Giants. We surely didn’t need the game to start 20 minutes later than advertised.

The picture was mostly clear and the graphics were not bad, and the stream worked. The score bug disappeared at times, like when mic’d-up Yankee second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. was being interviewed during a half inning, and no one knew the count.

The Netflix pregame show seemed to be designed for people who don’t really like baseball. It mostly dissolved into, “This is Your Life, Barry Bonds,” complete with 73 Netflix-branded kayaks in McCovey Cove.

Netflix spent most of the pregame telling viewers about all the other shows on Netflix. It was relentless, with each segment ending or starting with some promo. Not that many people watch pregames, so the better move is to focus then on the more ardent fans, not some dream of casuals tuning in an hour early.

Jameis Winston, who won a Heisman Trophy, is a backup quarterback in the NFL and played college baseball, was on the broadcast for some reason. Duncan asked him about crab legs, which was a reference to a 12-year-old story when Winston was cited for shoplifting. Odd thing to focus on.

In the top of the eighth inning, between a couple of WWE stars in the stands, Winston was on during a full half-inning. It was a blowout so it didn’t matter, but it wasn’t great. Winston seems very likable, but someone is going to need to figure out how to make him really work on TV. MLB Opening Night wasn’t the right moment for that experiment.

During one baseball-focused segment in the pregame, Rizzo interviewed his buddy and former teammate Aaron Judge. Rizzo prefaced a question with, “Netflix Opening Day.” That’s not a thing. No matter how many times you say it.

The game was on Netflix. We just wanted to watch “The Show.”