00:00Baseball fans, get ready to pay more for some marquee major league events starting next season.
00:05Commissioner Rob Manfred said Tuesday the league has new agreements in principle with NBC, ESPN, and Netflix for the next three years.
00:15And unless MLB gets creative with their first pitch times, there's a chance fans could tune in for the playoffs and instead see kickoffs.
00:24The new media rights deals became necessary after ESPN opted out of their MLB package in February.
00:33The Sports Network will keep a smaller regular season package in the New Deal for $200 million per season.
00:40Netflix is paying roughly $50 million per year to take over the popular Home Run Derby.
00:46And NBC will pay $200 million to get Sunday Night Baseball.
00:50The league will make roughly the same money they made when ESPN had all of those events under one roof, according to Manfred.
00:58We feel like Sunday Night Baseball on broadcast television is important.
01:03You know, we've worked really hard to keep ESPN in as a partner.
01:07And we think starting with Netflix is a really exciting opportunity for us.
01:11So for the next three years, fans will need a Netflix subscription for at least the month of July to see Cal Raleigh or any other MLB stars in the Home Run Derby.
01:21The streaming giant is taking a page right out of its Christmas Day NFL playbook.
01:27NBC adds baseball on Sunday night to a lineup that already includes Sunday Night Football and Sunday Night NBA games starting this season.
01:36NBC Sports President Rick Cordella acknowledged the plan to own that specific night is intentional.
01:43Having, you know, a great game of the week with fantastic production and storytelling, literally 50 weeks a year is what we'll have between the NFL, Major League Baseball and the NBA.
01:53And that's something that I don't think has ever happened before in broadcast TV history, so we're pretty excited about that.
01:57Fans might not be as excited.
02:00When the games overlap, as they will for most of the year, a subscription to Peacock will be required.
02:06First in the pecking order on broadcast TV will be football, then the NBA, and then baseball.
02:13The deal will also include some postseason games.
02:16Manfred said he's hoping it becomes easier for fans when the new deal expires in 2028.
02:21All of MLB's media rights will be up for negotiation once again.
02:25Manfred believes a centralized approach, including the league's regional sports networks, is best.
02:32If there's a centralized approach there, it's a lot easier to get into a world where a fan has a reduced number of places to look for a particular game.
02:45For me, the ideal would be, for example, having either an MLB network-based or a digitally-based kind of fallback where you always know if it's not a national game, I'm going to be able to find it one of these two places.
02:58Wanting that and getting it to happen are two different things.
03:02Manfred said a lot can change in three years.
03:05What he did not say is whether fans will have to pay even more to get all those games in a central location.
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