ESPN Set To Grab MLB.TV, Some Local Games In Latest Big Streaming Deal

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On the day ESPN is launching its much-awaited $30/month streaming app comes reports the Worldwide Leader is locking up digital rights to out-of-market games now carried on MLB.TV, and local games for five franchises.

ESPN would become baseball’s primary digital distributor for out-of-market games for the next three years. Earlier in the year, Disney-owned ESPN walked away from a $550-million-a-year deal with Major League Baseball that covered a national game of the week, despite years building up its Sunday-night cablecast into something of a TV sports institution. The current deal between the two sides expires at the end of the season, and includes up to 12 first-round playoff games and the Home Run Derby that precedes the All-Star Game in July.

This deal represents a very different sort of animal, with what’s now carried on MLB.TV becoming part of the new ESPN subscription streaming app that launched today. Importantly, the deal also covers local rights for five smaller MLB franchises – Cleveland, San Diego, Minnesota, Arizona and Colorado – that have struggled to find adequate home-town video distribution since the collapse of most regional sports networks amid cable cord-cutting.

Such RSN deals typically represented the second- or third-biggest check a smaller franchise might receive in a year, and the loss of RSN deals has punished the finances of numerous smaller franchises.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has been trying to shift the league’s video rights to a more centralized approach as he has tried to find ways to rescue the finances of those smaller franchises. But Manfred has faced strong pushback from some of the most successful and prominent franchises in the game, including the New York Yankees and Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs. All of have lucrative local rights deals with distributors they at least partly own.

Under the “framework agreement” for the new deal, according to New York Times-owned The Athletic, ESPN’s cable home would still carry about 30 games a year, though on a different night than Sunday. The agreement is not expected to be finalized until September.

If approved as reported, it would represent yet another seismic shift in sports streaming, especially for ESPN as it seeks to dominate the fractured environment for the most valuable content on live television.

Last month, Disney and minority co-owner Hearst announced they’d swapped a 10-percent ownership stake in ESPN in exchange for NFL Media assets such as the NFL Network, fan-beloved RedZone and the league’s official fantasy sports operation. ESPN also got rights to three additional NFL games a year.

And last year, ESPN and ABC were winning bidders on the biggest package of NBA TV rights for a massive new contract that takes effect this fall. Amazon and Comcast-owned NBC and Peacock also grabbed shares of NBA rights, beating out long-time partner Warner Bros. Discovery.

Also launching today is Fox’s sports-heavy streaming app Fox One, which for $19.99 a month provides access to programming from its broadcast operations, Fox Sports, Fox News Channel and Fox Business Channel. It is more of a general-interest app designed to appeal to Fox fans of all sorts, with no original programming. But it will offer live sports and other programming including the NFL, college Big 10 football and basketball, MLB, and Nascar.

Separately, ESPN has been heavily criticized this week in some quarters after it ended a deal with Oscar-winning writer/director Spike Lee to develop a multi-part documentary about Colin Kaepernick, the Black quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers who became a civil rights symbol while earning the enmity of conservatives for kneeling during the National Anthem at the start of games. He later couldn’t find a job in the league, and sued.

Critics noted the decision to kill the doc came after the NFL gained a share of ownership in ESPN, which Disney executives have denied was cause for the deal’s cancellation.