Facebook has announced a deal with Major League Baseball (MLB) to live-stream 20 of the league’s games on a weekly basis.
As part of a new deal with Major League Baseball, starting last Friday, Facebook began streaming MLB games on its platform. The deal includes the streaming of 20 games available to users in the U.S. through the MLB’s Facebook Page. The first game took place last Friday, 19 May, between the Colorado Rockies and Cincinnati Reds.
From now on, there will be a new game each week for fans to watch. Commenting on the move, Dan Reed, who heads Facebook‘s global sports unit, explained that baseball games are “uniquely engaging community experiences, as the chatter and rituals in the stands are often as meaningful to fans as the action on the diamond.” Facebook’s move to distribute a live game each week on the platform allows MLB to “reimagine this social experience on a national scale.”
This deal with MLB is only one of the many being drafted by Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook itself, seeing that live streaming of sports content will increase user engagement and revenue from ads. In Twitter’s case, deals like this could have an increasingly positive role for the platform at this time. Either way, the live streaming environment is getting more and more competitive, and I am sure that we will see many more such sports-focused deals in the near future.
[box]Read more: CrossFit Is A Thing Obvs, And Facebook Will Start Livestreaming[/box]