Sources: Facebook is in talks to live stream one MLB game per week during upcoming season
Facebook Inc is in talks with Major League Baseball to live stream one game per week during the upcoming season, which could be a key win as the social media platform works to offer more live sports …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook has been assembling a live-sports playbook since launching Sports Stadium, its real-time scores and chat hub, in early 2016 — the infrastructure a weekly MLB stream would plug into. The pitch is social viewing: the game as a shared News Feed event rather than a broadcast.
The talks also answer a competitive threat. Twitter has spent the prior year buying rights across the NFL, NBA, MLB and Wimbledon and is even courting Apple TV distribution to capitalize on those live deals. If Facebook lands MLB, the two platforms are locked in a bidding contest for the same rights holders.
First-order effects
- MLB gains a second deep-pocketed bidder alongside Twitter, strengthening its hand in pricing weekly streaming packages for the upcoming season.
- Facebook converts its Sports Stadium audience infrastructure into a live-content anchor, moving from scores-and-chat hub to an actual game distributor.
Second-order effects
- Twitter, which has been shopping its sports app to Apple TV to maximize its existing NFL, MLB and NBA streams, faces pressure to deepen its own rights portfolio — it was already in talks with the NBA, MLS and Turner for more live games.
- A weekly Facebook MLB package sets the template for the league's later moves: the non-exclusive 20-game Friday night deal signed in May 2017, and then the exclusive 25-game afternoon package that made MLB the first league airing season games solely on Facebook.
Third-order effects
- If leagues keep splitting weekly packages across platforms, sports rights shift from monolithic broadcast contracts to a menu of non-exclusive digital slices — with social platforms bidding up the price of a single weekly game.
- Facebook's later multiyear NFL highlights deal for Facebook Watch suggests where this leads: leagues treating Facebook as a standing distribution channel rather than an experiment, and platforms treating live sports as the retention engine for their video products.
The trend: Live sports rights are fragmenting from exclusive broadcast packages into weekly, platform-specific streaming deals that social networks bid against each other to secure.