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Alden Gonzalez, ESPN Staff Writer
Major League Baseball announced Monday that it has agreed to an exclusive, multi-year contract with the streaming company Roku, which will air one Sunday game from now until the middle of September. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Roku’s package, branded as “Sunday Leadoff,” consists of 18 games starting with this Sunday’s 1:05 p.m. ET contest between the St. Louis Cardinals and Boston Red Sox and lasting through Sept. 15. With the exception of two West coast start times, Roku games will be the first ones taking place for varying exclusive windows each Sunday. Twenty-four teams are part of the package, including the New York Yankees (July 14 against the Baltimore Orioles) and Los Angeles Dodgers (Sept. 1 against the Arizona Diamondbacks).
Games on Roku can be watched for free either through the app, on Roku devices or through Amazon Fire, Samsung and Google TVs, among other outlets. Those with MLB.tv subscriptions can also watch those games blackout-free. MLB will produce the broadcasts and wrote in its release that it would use “market-focused” broadcasters for the games. The goal, a source with knowledge of the deal said, is to use either local broadcast crews or MLB Network talent with ties to the region.
MLB announced that Roku secured exclusive rights to a Sunday game, beginning this week and lasting through Sept. 15. Those games will also be available blackout-free to https://t.co/oZzKpIgKgu subscribers.
Here’s the schedule MLB released … pic.twitter.com/ekn11BNcE4
— Alden González (@Alden_Gonzalez) May 13, 2024
Roku has subsequently launched an MLB Zone channel that will act as a “one-stop destination for fans to browse, discover and stream everything MLB,” according to MLB’s release. The release also stated that The Roku Channel reached an estimated 120 million people in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2023.
MLB’s deal with Roku, which comes two years after select Friday games began appearing on Apple TV, is the latest in its efforts to make games available through streaming devices at a time when the linear-cable model is quickly deteriorating. Roku’s deal essentially replaces one the league previously held with Peacock, NBC’s streaming service.
Diamond Sports Group, which originally held the local rights for 14 MLB teams, has spent the last 14 months in bankruptcy court and recently failed to agree on a new deal with one of its three major distributors, Comcast, a development that left fans throughout the country without access to their local teams and might significantly impact Diamond’s ability to emerge from bankruptcy.
MLB owners throughout the industry blamed the uncertainty of their regional sports contracts for limiting their spending this offseason, a circumstance that has created even more tension with the MLB Players’ Association midway through the current collective bargaining agreement.