MLB Fans Forced To Navigate Field of Streams

The dawn of the streaming era once promised a brighter future for sports fans, a blissful world of à la carte consumption in which everyone could break free of their overstuffed, overpriced cable subscriptions and pay only for what they really wanted to see.

The reality, as baseball diehards are discovering this season, is much less idyllic, reports Bloomberg.

To watch all the games they want, many fans will have to pay not only for cable but also for multiple streaming services. And once they’ve figured out which app or channel is showing their favorite team, they will be left hoping that the live stream doesn’t crash at a crucial moment. Last month, in the third and fourth innings of Apple Inc.’s first baseball broadcast, some viewers found themselves gazing unhappily at a dreaded error message.

The current fragmented landscape can be traced back, in part, to last year when ESPN decided to scale back the number of games it would broadcast as part of a new contract. Afterward, Major League Baseball sold a large portion of those games to Apple and to Comcast Corp.’s Peacock. This season, New York Yankees fans will also need a third streaming service because Amazon.com Inc., which owns a stake in the team’s cable channel, started streaming a package of 21 games that will air exclusively on Prime Video.

Subscriptions to Prime Video start at $9 a month. Peacock’s Sunday slate will be behind a $5-a-month paywall. The games on Apple are free.

Noah Garden, chief revenue officer for Major League Baseball, said in an interview that the league decided to push deeper into streaming this season, in part, to be less vulnerable in the years ahead to cable-TV blackouts. In some cases, disputes between cable-TV companies and local sports channels have left fans unable to see their teams for long stretches.