Peacock Gets Exclusive Lineup of 18 Sunday Morning Baseball Games
You may need yet another streaming service to watch your baseball team's games.
Peacock on Wednesday announced a deal with Major League Baseball that makes its paid service the only way to watch a slate of 18 Sunday games this season—starting with the Boston Red Sox hosting the Chicago White Sox at 11:30 a.m. on April 10.
The NBCUniversal-owned streaming service—$4.99 a month for viewing with ads and $9.99 for an almost-ad-free version—will then feature one game a week starting at 11:30 a.m. or noon local through Sept. 4.
Peacock’s deal makes home viewing even more complex for baseball fans. Starting with a New York Mets-Washington Nationals tilt on Friday evening, some Friday-night games will only be available on Apple TV+. Apple is making at least the first half of this season’s Friday Night Baseball coverage, announced at its March 8 event, free to watch.
New York Yankees fans, meanwhile, will need Amazon Prime Video to watch 21 games exclusive to that service, the New York Post reports. And ESPN will continue to carry its lineup of Sunday night games.
Aside from a subset of games aired on local broadcast TV, most of the rest of baseball’s schedule continues to be confined to regional sports networks. Most traditional pay-TV bundles carry them, but many streaming TV services still avoid or have dropped these channels because of their high cost and limited demand. Your best bet to find your team's "RSN" is DirecTV Stream, but the relevant “Choice” bundle costs $90 a month.
Major League Baseball itself offers MLB.tv, which T-Mobile is once again providing for free to subscribers. But that service blocks “regional” viewers, a term that MLB stretches to cover hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles. Some viewers evade
Read more on pcmag.com
