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Everyone loves free baseball, that’s why extra innings and doubleheaders are such a big deal. This upcoming MLB season, you’ll also get free baseball and you won’t have to travel to the stadium and pay ridiculous parking and beer prices. Facebook and Major League Baseball came to an agreement to stream 25 MLB games on the social media giant in 2018.
Facebook will stream 25 afternoon FREE games during the week, primarily on Wednesdays. There goes productivity at work. The first game will come on April 4th between the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets. Facebook is believed to have paid between $30-$35 million for the MLB games.
Facebook has been making a concerted effort to broadcast live sports on their gigantic social media platform that has 2.2 billion monthly active users as of the fourth quarter of 2017. Last year, Facebook nailed down a deal with Fox Sports to broadcast soccer matches from the UEFA Champions League as well as an agreement to stream live games from Mexico’s top soccer league. This year, Facebook struck a deal to stream 47 college basketball games.
Facebook could be inching their way to competing with the major television networks for broadcast rights of big league sports. While network and cable TV seem to be in a downfall and losing viewers to streaming services such as Netflix, Facebook continues to show tremendous growth. Facebook has 1.4 billion active daily users and made $40 billion in ad revenue last year. It will be interesting to see if sports ratings keep slipping on network TV, as the NFL did last season, if Facebook is able to secure a substantial broadcast deal with one of the major sports.