Major League Baseball announced earlier today that it had agreed to an extension of its current broadcast deal with Fox. The network will have both the English and Spanish-language broadcast rights to MLB’s biggest events including the World Series and the Major Legaue Baseball All Star Game through 2028. The reported $5 billion deal includes playoff games for Fox, FS1, and Fox Deportes as well. The network will get one League Championship Series and two Divisional Series each year.
The new deal also extends Fox’s Saturday regular season broadcasts with the league. It gets two games every Saturday during the season for a total of 52 games. The new deal has that total increasing in 2022.
Fox also gets streaming rights to both live games and highlights, but according to John Ourand of Sports Business Daily, that isn’t the only streaming deal Major League Baseball is set to announce.
Meanwhile, MLB also will announce a streaming deal with DAZN that will not include any live games, but allows for live cut-ins, similar to how MLB Network handles its studio show “MLB Tonight.” The three-year deal is a relatively small but significant move as DAZN continues its push into the U.S. market under the direction of Exec Chair John Skipper.
DAZN and MLB already have a relationship in Canada, where the over-the-top sports platform streams content from the MLB Network.
