MLB.TV subscribers paid up to $150 this season and couldn’t watch Opening Night without also paying for Netflix. That’s the story. Everything else — the foggy holographic ads, the missing scorebug, the 25-minute pregame infomercial for “Free Bert” — is color.
The original Netflix-MLB deal, announced with the usual language about “innovative partnerships” and “unprecedented access,” covers 2026 through 2028: Opening Night, the Home Run Derby, and the Field of Dreams Game, at somewhere between $50 and $60 million per year. Netflix didn’t get to carry baseball. Netflix got to carry baseball away from the people who were already paying for it. The distinction matters.
On March 25, the Yankees played the Giants on a platform that fans had to separately subscribe to — no simulcast, no MLB.TV workaround. A subscriber who has paid $150 for every game this season sat out Opening Night unless they forked over more money. Baseball’s response to this arrangement, then and now, has been enthusiastic. Netflix’s response was to run a press release with the headline “Netflix Steps Up to the Plate: MLB Opening Night on Netflix Scores 3 Million US Viewers” — a line that deserves to be read twice, slowly, like a parking ticket.
The actual number was 2.97 million. The number NBC drew the next night for Dodgers-Diamondbacks was 3.2 million. Front Office Sports noted that Netflix’s celebrated Opening Night viewership was lower than a standard NBC regular-season broadcast 24 hours later — which did not stop Netflix CCO Bela Bajaria from describing the event as a “massive cultural spectacle” and “the ultimate home for both the story and the sport.” It’s an impressive claim given that the broadcast missed the first-ever Automatic Ball-Strike challenge in MLB regular-season history because it was airing a dugout interview with the Giants manager at the time.
The pregame ran 25 minutes over its scheduled start. Not because of rain. Because of celebrity introductions: Bert Kreischer, WWE’s Jey Uso. Fans watching through fog-textured holographic ads over Oracle Park and squinting at a scorebug Awful Announcing described as “occasionally a disaster” were also treated to on-air promotion for “Little Brother,” “Stranger Things,” “Thrash,” “Man on Fire,” and “Monday Night Raw.” Netflix analyst Elle Duncan, defending the broadcast afterward: “This was for the baseball curious.” Which is a coherent vision for a product, just not a product that MLB.TV subscribers were told they were buying into.
Duncan also said, and this is real, “asking us not to be Netflix is not a thing that’s going to happen.” Fair enough. But maybe asking MLB to represent its subscribers’ interests is a thing that should happen, and hasn’t.
The coverage aftermath was muted where it mattered most. Awful Announcing and SI called the broadcast embarrassing — SI went with “a complete and total embarrassment” — and a handful of outlets (Mediaite, BroBible, The Mirror) ran critical pieces. But the broader sports media ecosystem mostly accepted the framing that 2.97 million viewers was a win, that the technical problems were growing pains, that this is just where sports is going. Which is correct on the last count, and that’s exactly the problem. The “this is just where it’s going” shrug is doing a lot of work as a substitute for asking whether where it’s going is good for the people who watch baseball.
Netflix gets $150 from streaming subscribers and wants more of your money. MLB gets $50-60 million a year and wants the prestige of being on a premium platform. Both of them have perfectly aligned incentives to call 2.97 million viewers a success, miss the ABS challenge, and schedule a second season. Nobody in that negotiating room was representing the person who bought MLB.TV in January.
