Major League Baseball's latest TV deal finalized

[Bob F]

WSJ saying it's $800MM/year over three years, between NBCU (who'll take over the Sunday night banner on the main network), Netflix and, as many had suspected, a smaller role for ESPN: https://deadline.com/2025/11/major-league-baseball-rights-deals-espn-netflix-nbcuniversal-1236623833/ (link)

But the lack of labor peace can complicate all that...

B

[Joe Hass]

What is infuriating to me is that, once again, MLB is handing out exclusive windows like butterscotch at Grandma's house. If you lived in Chicago and wanted to watch all 162 Cubs regular season games and the first two rounds of the playoffs, you'd have to have access to (pay for): 

* Marquee Sports Network 

* ESPN

* Apple TV+

* Fox

* Roku

* TBS

Now we're going to ditch Roku, but add Netflix and Peacock?!? Why does Rob Manfred (who screwed the pooch with the ESPN and Roku deals earlier this year) hate his own sport? This is why I've never understood the hatred towards the NFL with their multiple partners: since their first deal with ESPN in 1987, they've always ensured if you live in the local market, you always get *all* your games OTA, regardless of who's carrying them. 

Where's the Tylenol?

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[Adam Bowie]

The UK part of The Athletic has published some good writing and a podcast documentary (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-underground-world-of-illegal-streaming/id1488521447?i=1000735929491) on sports piracy in the last week or so. This feels like an existential threat to sports rights owners now as they spread their wares across multiple platforms, and people just can't afford all the different streaming services to follow their favourite sports and teams.

The podcast documentary concentrates on the Premier League, but I think the same is true for lots of other sports. "Fire Sticks" (using the term generically rather than only Amazon devices) that run Android and can have pirate streaming apps "sideloaded" onto them have proliferated enormously. Lots of people are very open about the fact that they have one of these to stream sports.

If you don't know, it basically works like this. You either already have a Fire Stick or similar, and you find someone advertising on WhatsApp. They'll point you to a website where you download an app to your Fire Stick. You then pay someone an amount of money for access to the app. In the UK that might be £60 ($79) for a year's access, and you get everything. Every sport from Premier League to F1 to PPV Boxing. It might not come with English commentary, and it might not have the usual graphics or presentation that you're familiar with, but you get the sport that you want, with the streams themselves often being sourced from an overseas location. (Sidenote: In the UK, Premier League games often briefly display numbers in the corner of the screen during the match. They're bespoke to my box, and mean that if I pirated my feed, the Premier League's anti-piracy people could trace the source of the pirate feed directly to me!).

The way that access is sold to these pirate apps is similar to drug dealers. There are higher level folk who have distributors and then dealers on the ground. The dealers are easiest to catch of course, and they're probably using PayPal or direct bank transfers to collect their money (Venmo isn't really a thing in the UK). So that's easy to trace. But further up the chain it probably turns into crypto and is much harder to follow. Organised crime gangs are running many of these schemes, with the servers themselves being located overseas.

But obviously, as sports costs rise, and subscriptions are increased to account for those costs, it becomes more attractive to more people to go to piracy which is probably seen as a "victimless crime".

Incidentally, Amazon's very latest Fire Sticks no longer use Android and you can no longer sideload apps onto them. Amazon, of course, is invested in streaming sports itself, and was probably under pressure from sports rights owners to do something. But there are a multitude of  no-name generic Android sticks that you can buy on Amazon very cheaply and that can do the same thing.

Adam

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[Doug Eastick]

I just went searching for a news article I recall about a Toronto operation that got busted sometime in 2025.    But I found this one instead from Nova Scotia..... which mentions Adam's soccer league stuff at the very tail end.

The rise and fall of a Halifax man's illegal TV streaming empire | CBC News

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[Tom Wolper]

I recently started to get spammed on Facebook from a couple of these services. I searched the first service whose ad I saw and only got bot “review “ sites that didn’t say whether the streaming site was legitimate or not. I’ve seen that Facebook has stopped blocking fraudulent sites from advertising so I figured it to be some sort of scam.

When I watched video from my desktop I’d occasionally watch sports from pirated sites. They tended not to stay up for too long. I assume these newer services will also go away frequently and anybody who signed up for a subscription may keep getting charged.

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