MLB In Serious Talks With Apple To Stream Mid-Week Games

Major League Baseball is in serious talks with Apple
AAPL
to stream games starting with the 2022 season.

Ever since the linear national television deal with ESPN was inked, questions have mounted about a drop in games the Worldwide Leader was dropping. While ESPN is keeping Sunday Night Baseball, much of the mid-week package was dropped leaving a gap.

Since then, talks about having a streaming partner have increased. For a bit, Barstool Sports was being discussed, but as I reported last week on Twitter, that deal was not considered serious.

Now, the suitor for the games has come to light.

Andrew Marchand, the sports media reporter for the New York Post is saying that MLB is in serious talks with Apple to stream the mid-week games. The move would be the first step by Apple to stream live sports.

The deal would come nowhere near the amount Amazon is paying the NFL for the rights to Thursday Night Football, which starts with the 2022-23 season. While that deal is worth around $1 billion, MLB’s deal would be considerably less.

But for the owners in Major League Baseball, it may not be so much about trying to keep up with the NFL and more about keeping the inventory of nationally broadcast games the same while also benefitting from an increase in national media rights.

Starting this year, national television media rights for the league are set to increase to $12.24 billion for the 2022-28 seasons. The annual revenues go from $1.5 billion with the contracts that expired at the end of last season to $1.76 billion when the new deals kick in.

While I have not heard what a potential deal might be worth, if one were to be brokered with Apple at say, $240 million would be less than half the amount of the new ESPN deal which comes in at $550 million annually.

That was a drop from $700 million annually as part of the last national partnership by ESPN. A deal with Apple in the $240 million range would cover that $150 million gap, and more pushing national media rights to $2 billion annually between FOX, TBS, ESPN, and Apple.

The biggest question may be whether Apple would gain exclusive rights to the Monday and Wednesday games. The deal with ESPN for those games was non-exclusive.