Report: MLB Yankees Team With Amazon For Streaming

The Yankees may soon become a major-league thorn in the side of New York’s cable providers.

The Bronx Bombers, working with tech giant Amazon, are gearing up to become the first Major League Baseball team to let fans watch games on their phones or laptops without a cable subscription — a bid to win over millennials who are cutting ties with cable TV, The NY Post has learned.

The plan by the Yankees’ YES cable-TV network is to allow online streaming for a limited number of Yankees games — possibly on Amazon’s Prime Video service — starting as soon as the 2020 baseball season, sources said. The ultimate goal is to provide an annual streaming package at a cost — say one year for $99, sources said.

The move comes as the Yankees saw its TV ratings drop 17% this year — despite the team winning their division. While earlier game times were a main culprit, cord-cutting also played a role, sources said.

Making the move possible is a unanimous vote last month by all MLB team owners to OK the streaming of local games, a practice known as in-market streaming. Prior to that vote, in-market streaming rights belonged to MLB, not the teams, and MLB sold those rights to individual regional sports networks, or RSNs, like Fox and YES for $2 million a year.

The vote may seem like a game-changer, but it could be years before most teams are able to start streaming their games due to complicated contracts with local cable providers and the regional sports networks that carry their games.

The Yankees have it easier because the team owns 20% of its local TV network, which means it won’t be fighting with YES over the streaming rights.