UPDATE: On Monday afternoon, Major League Baseball announced that they would not be billing subscribers for the 2022 season on March 1 as originally planned. Instead, they would be waiting until a new collective bargaining agreement had been reached with the players.
The league directed subscribers to check their email for an update, but many Twitter users in the comments below the message indicated that the reversal came too late and that they had already canceled their subscription out of fear of being charged for service with no definitive start date.
As of yet, there has been no word on if MLB.TV will reach out to those customers in an effort to bring them back onboard once games begin.
If you are still in a post-Super Bowl hangover and haven’t transitioned into paying attention to any other sports yet, that’s understandable, but Monday, Feb. 28 is an important day for baseball fans. Last week, the Major League Baseball owners arbitrarily set today as the last day for a deal to be made with the MLB Players Association to avoid regular season games being canceled and not made up.
The baseball season is currently scheduled to being on March 31 with all teams in action on Opening Day. However, despite on-going talks, it is not currently expected that the two sides will come to a resolution in time to end the lockout that the owners imposed late last year.
So that means that in order to avoid being billed for a service that will likely be losing a significant amount of its inventory this season, today is the last day for subscribers to MLB.TV to cancel the auto-renew billing on their subscription. If customers do not cancel by Feb. 28, they will be billed the full 2022 subscription price for their selected 2021 package.
The March 1 auto-renew deadline has been a consistent date for the streamer for seasons, but is conspicuously timed with the owners’ recent drop-dead date for negotiations. Current subscribers can cancel the auto-renew function in the Manage Subscriptions tab of their profile, by sending an e-mail to subscriptions@website.mlb.com, or by calling MLB.com Customer Service at 866-800-1275 or 512-434-1542 outside the US.
Subscribers who had access to MLB.TV in 2021 thanks to a T-Mobile subscription won’t have auto-renew enabled.
Across the 2021 season, Major League Baseball said that more than 10 billion minutes of game action was streamed on MLB.TV. According to the league, the streaming platform racked up a total of 10.5 billion minutes of viewing, which dwarfed the previous record of 7.38 billion set in 2019.
The league added that MLB.TV recorded just under 142 million games watched over the course of the 2021 regular season, making it the most-watched in the service’s history. The total was an increase of more than 37% over the previous record of 101.4 million games — also from the 2019 season.
MLB.TV
MLB.TV is the official streaming service of Major League Baseball. You can see every out-of-market game live or on demand, and choose home or away TV and radio feeds. The app allows fans to watch up to four games simultaneously on the same screen through their Multi-view feature.