Why Roku Could Be the Perfect Streaming Partner for MLB’s ‘Sunday Leadoff’ Package
Why Roku Could Be the Perfect Streaming Partner for MLB’s ‘Sunday Leadoff’ Package
This week, MLB announced a deal with Roku to stream one game per week free on The Roku Chanel.
The Roku Channel is ready to play ball. The free ad-supported streaming platform has made its bones with linear TV channels, delivering hundreds of carefully curated streaming channels offering classic TV, popular movies, and more. But this week, Roku announced that it had signed its first live sports deal with one of America’s top professional leagues, reaching an agreement with Major League Baseball to distribute the “Sunday Leadoff” package of games for the rest of 2024. The deal is a major milestone for Roku, and could work to the benefit of both parties involved considering MLB’s current viewing audience.
Key Details:
- Roku revealed in the first quarter that it had 81.6 million streaming households.
- MLB has struggled to attract audiences from demographics that stream more than they watch TV.
- Roku’s status as a free streaming platform could be the X-factor MLB needs to draw younger viewers.
The deal is an obvious boon for Roku, which gets to offer one of the top sports products in the United States on its platform without having to assume a huge array of production costs. It will leverage already-existing broadcaster/play-by-play announcer teams instead of creating its own, for example.
Fans also stand to benefit from the change to Roku for “Sunday Leadoff.” For the previous two seasons, this package of nationally available games was only available to subscribers of NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock, meaning that they were locked behind a paywall. However, the barriers to viewing on The Roku Channel are minimal. While the streamer is obviously available on any streaming device or smart TV that utilizes Roku’s operating system, it is also available on a huge list of devices, including desktop, mobile, and smart TV platforms from a wide range of manufacturers. There’s no subscription required to sign up for the service, making it nearly as easy as possible for fans to stream the 18 games in the package.
Why MLB Could Benefit Most from Deal with Roku
Major League Baseball could see the most gain from the new deal with Roku. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, so it’s not clear if MLB got anything close to the $30 million per season that NBCU paid when the “Sunday Leadoff” games were on Peacock. But merely having the games available on a national platform is a plus for MLB, which saw the 2024 season begin without a partner for the package after Peacock offered to renew its deal for “Sunday Leadoff” at a much lower price.
Roku offers superior reach to Peacock, which as of its last quarterly report had 34 million subscribers. During the first quarter of 2024, Roku Channel’s reached grew to 81.6 million households, and streaming hours on the platform rose to over 30 billion. Having “Sunday Leadoff” games available to an audience more than double the size that could watch them in 2023 is a great way for MLB to attract new fans, especially considering The Roku Channel is free to watch.
The greatest advantage to MLB in sending the “Sunday Leadoff” bundle to Roku could be in the platform’s ability to ease the transition from linear to streaming for baseball’s typically older, change-adverse audience. PCH Insights recently released a survey that shows that baseball is most often watched by older audiences who have traditionally been resistant to streaming. Audiences aged 18-24, so this move also obviously is meant to appeal to them, but because of the ubiquity of Roku’s OS and the fact that it is free, might be the best way to help the audiences that are hesitant to stream sports to make the move.
An enhanced streaming presence is something that MLB officials have wanted for some time. Commissioner Rob Manfred has dreams of launching an in-market MLB streaming platform with the rights to around 15 teams by 2025, though its current deals with regional sports networks make that dream a difficult one to realize at best. The Roku deal gives Manfred a chance to at least keep “Sunday Leadoff” on a streamer while he tries to take the next streaming step with his league.
Roku first cut its teeth in live sports broadcasts with its streams of Formula E races, which it acquired the rights to in summer 2023. It’s clearly ready to move up to something more with its pact to acquire “MLB Sunday Leadoff” rights. It’s a big deal for Roku, but it could be an even bigger one for MLB, which is sending the games to a platform that’s easy to access and more likely to offer viewers from an audience segment the league desperately needs to court.
Roku Channel
The Roku Channel is a free, ad-supported streaming service that offers a broad mix of movies, TV shows, live linear channels, and original programming. Available to all viewers — not just Roku device owners — the service features licensed content from major studios alongside Roku Originals, which include exclusive series, movies, and specials previously produced for Quibi, as well as new original projects developed specifically for the platform.