Facebook to Stream 20 MLB Games on Friday Nights in 2017/8 Season (May 18, 2017)

Twitter already has a deal with Major League Baseball to stream some games, and now it appears Facebook has a similar arrangement. The latter will broadcast 20 Friday-night games throughout the season. Given other recent deals for major sports, including Twitter’s last year for Thursday night NFL games, that might sound like a lot, but of course there are 30 teams in the MLB, each of which plays 162 regular season games, which means that including the postseason there are nearly 2500 games in total each year, so Facebook will air less than 1% of the total. And I’m guessing Friday night games have among the lowest viewership of any games, so this feels like a low-risk proposition for MLB and an experiment at best for Facebook. For viewers, too, the chances that Facebook will be showing the one game your team is playing in any given Friday night will be slim. But this feels like a good step for Facebook as it both scales up its live broadcast offerings and feels out what the audiences will be like for sports on Facebook.

via FT


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