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MLB’s Short TV Deal with ESPN, NBC, Netflix Is a Media Money Move for 2029
Boardroom breaks down why MLB intentionally kept its recently announced media rights pact to just three years, much shorter than its NBA and NFL counterparts.Major League Baseball announced a new media rights deal last week that brought NBC into the fold for the first time since 1990, continued its nearly four-decade partnership with ESPN, and gave Netflix baseball rights in the U.S. for the very first time.NBC and Peacock will take over the Sunday morning and night packages and the Wild Card round from ESPN, which will still broadcast 30 out-of-market games a year and take over the MLB.TV package, along with in-market RSN rights for six of the 30 MLB teams. Netflix will stream one-off events like Opening Night, the Home Run Derby, and the Field of Dreams game.According to ESPN, MLB is set to bring in roughly $800 million per year between the three networks – $550 million from ESPN, $200 million from NBC, and $50 million from Netflix. But what truly stands out in this deal is not the broader distribution for games or Netflix’s inclusion, but the length of the media rights contract. It’s a three-year pact, concluding after the 2028 season, vastly shorter than agreements similar leagues have signed.The new NBA media deal that started this season? Eleven years. The NFL‘s media rights deal signed in 2021? Also, 11 years. Why would MLB accept an arrangement that’s a quarter of the amount of time as other major sports? Stay Ahead of the Game, Get Our NewslettersSubscribe for the biggest stories in the business of sports and entertainment, daily.It turns out that MLB did not choose this amount of time by accident. After 2028, its existing national rights agreements with Fox, which broadcasts the World Series, All-Star Game, and Saturday games, and TNT Sports, which broadcasts half of the league championship series and weekly Tuesday games, will also expire. Which means, for the first time in a long time, MLB will clear the decks and have every single possible game up for bid in both the U.S. and internationally.Many media partners have shown interest, a source close to MLB told Boardroom, and now they can choose to go in on any and everything starting in 2029. It also allows baseball to do something that commissioner Rob Manfred has talked about for years, which is potentially redefining the local coverage for all 30 teams. Currently, each team negotiates its own local television deal with a national RSN like Main Street Sports Group’s FanDuel Sports Network, or a smaller one-off entity like YES or SNY in New York, NESN in Boston, and Marquee in Chicago.Manfred would love to nationalize local coverage and sell that off too, and we’re getting a preview of that through ESPN’s MLB.TV deal, which allows the network to distribute the popular out-of-market package on ESPN’s new direct-to-consumer app. Although it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get full sign-off from these smaller RSNs, bringing local rights to market as well as national rights further increases MLB’s flexibility in what it can offer potential future bidders.This new media rights deal stemmed from ESPN opting out of its deal earlier in 2025, opening up the Sunday night and first-round playoff packages. ESPN reportedly thought it was paying too much for what it was getting, but neither side wanted a full split, which is why the network is still in the baseball business. Now, ESPN, NBC, and Netflix are the main players in what we’ll call a bridge deal gearing up for 2028.MLB has all its ducks in a row, with streamers like Netflix and Apple getting a taste of what a national partnership could look like, and Amazon continuing to test the waters with its local New York Yankees streaming partnership thanks to its minority stake in YES. Like the new NBA deal, MLB was able to prioritize more broadcast distribution, bringing Sunday nights from cable, and hopes to continue the momentum from the World Series, where Game 7 between the Dodgers and Blue Jays was the most-watched baseball game since 1991.So, when you see MLB only signing a three-year media deal, know it chose that length for a specific reason, pushing all its chips to the center of the table for a media rights package in 2029 that will help define the sport’s direction into the next decade.Read More:101119post6ORdate 
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Shlomo SprungShlomo Sprung is a Senior Staff Writer at Boardroom. He has more than a decade of experience in journalism, with past work appearing in Forbes, MLB.com, Awful Announcing, and The Sporting News. He graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2011, and his Twitter and Spotify addictions are well under control. Just ask him.