{"id":857865,"date":"2026-09-23T14:42:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T14:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/857865\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T14:42:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T14:42:10","slug":"rob-manfred-happy-with-mlbs-stop-gap-national-tv-deals-after-year-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/857865\/","title":{"rendered":"Rob Manfred happy with MLB&#8217;s stop-gap national TV deals after Year 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The MLB regular season is drawing to a close, and with it, the first of three seasons under the league\u2019s stop-gap national television rights deals.<\/p>\n<p>After ESPN decided to opt out of its\u00a0Sunday Night Baseball deal following the 2025 season (which MLB says was a mutual decision), the league was on the clock to find a new partner to take over its premier regular-season package and recoup some of the $550 million ESPN was paying annually for it.<\/p>\n<p>As it would turn out, MLB would secure multiple new partners\u00a0and keep ESPN on board for a different package. NBC took over most of ESPN\u2019s old inventory, which includes Sunday Night Baseball and the Wild Card round. Netflix secured rights to Opening Night and the Home Run Derby. And ESPN paired a new package of about 30 weeknight games with rights to license MLB.tv for its app, which will include in-market rights to about half of the league beginning next season.<\/p>\n<p>The trio of deals will run only three years, until after the 2028 season when MLB\u2019s other national television deals with Fox and TNT Sports expire.<\/p>\n<p>Assessing how Year 1 of the short-term arrangements went, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred saw a number of positives.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNBC, from Day 1, was about reach for us and they certainly delivered that,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sportsbusinessjournal.com\/Articles\/2026\/09\/21\/manfred-pleased-with-year-1-of-new-mlb-national-media-arrangement\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Manfred told Sports Business Journal<\/a>. \u201cEqually important, they leaned into baseball. The promotion surrounding things like Opening Day has just been phenomenal.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The viewership would seem to support Manfred\u2019s assessment. NBC\u2019s 14\u00a0Sunday Night Baseball telecasts averaged 2.7 million viewers (including Peacock streaming figures via Adobe Analytics). It\u2019s the package\u2019s highest average audience since 2007, though comparing NBC to ESPN is a bit apples-to-oranges as a number of Peacock-exclusive games are excluded from the data.<\/p>\n<p>On Netflix, the commissioner struck a more measured tone, acknowledging that there is a sacrifice inherent in putting games on a streaming service.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is the balance that you have to strike. There is a younger demographic that\u2019s available there, but it\u2019s a streaming service, and the people in the bundle are not necessarily used to going into a streaming service,\u201d he told SBJ.<\/p>\n<p>Netflix MLB viewership was largely underwhelming. The Home Run Derby was the least-watched since 2003, and the Field of Dreams Game averaged just 1.66 million viewers.<\/p>\n<p>The final test of MLB\u2019s short-term deals will be NBC and Peacock\u2019s broadcasts of the Wild Card round in less than a week\u2019s time. Fans have been accustomed to watching those games on ESPN and ABC. Now, they\u2019ll shift to NBC and Peacock. With more games on broadcast television, but some games exclusively on a streamer, it will be interesting to see if viewership can keep pace with ESPN\u2019s benchmark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The MLB regular season is drawing to a close, and with it, the first of three seasons under&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":857866,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,157028,157027,157026,9099,82415,92],"class_list":["post-857865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-mlb-on-espn","tag-mlb-on-nbc","tag-mlb-on-netflix","tag-rob-manfred","tag-sunday-night-baseball","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/857866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}