Facebook in Talks to Livestream One Major League Baseball Game Per Week

[cageymaru]

Facebook is in talks with Major League Baseball to livestream a game a week. Sporting events are one of the last forms of content that is normally viewed live. Having an audience on at a certain time period will allow Facebook to attract and advertise to fans of the sport. MLB is seeking to groom the younger crowd into having an interest in the sport and Facebook certainly caters to that demographic. A deal with Univision Communications Inc has been inked to livestream 46 Mexican soccer matches on Facebook in 2017. Facebook already does international basketball, soccer, and table tennis.

Twitter won the coveted NFL livestreaming contract. It would be assumed that Twitter won since it has the more popular sporting event. I would say that Facebook won since it will have a lot more chances during the year to advertise over the MLB content, as the baseball season is much longer than a football season. At any rate it provides another avenue for cable cord cutters to experience free sporting content. Cable cord cutters unite!

For social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, live streaming sports is key to attracting people since sports is one of the few types of content that people still watch live.

"Facebook is aggressively going after sports content and they are now one of a number of competitors to traditional media outlets that are going after sports programming," said sports media consultant Lee Berke. "It makes perfect sense that they would be going after name brand properties like the MLB."

 

[MrCaffeineX]

Awesome! Free baseball is great, I just hope they don't black out the games I want to watch. MLB really needs to step up their game with their own streaming service. I can't watch my team play without cable TV and an upgrade package, plus they keep killing the ability to stream via VPN/IP-masking services that I used to be able to use to get around their arbitrary restrictions.

 

[westrock2000]

Logging in to Facebook to watch TV? Sounds pretty cool.

 

[vegeta535]

Logging in to Facebook to watch TV? Sounds pretty cool.

That picture is the sad truth of our future. With all the research they do about advertising you would think advertising fatigued is a real thing. But no they just keep jamming more down our throats. I for one am pretty numb to any advertising at this point that it rarely notice them anymore.