In what is a huge boost to the live content present on it platform, Facebook has announced a partnership with Major League Baseball that will bring as many as 20 regular season games to its platform. While the time and location of other games will be announced later, we already have the first one airing tomorrow on the official MLB Facebook Page.
All of these broadcasts will be sourced from a feed belonging to a participating team’s local broadcaster rightsholder. Interestingly MLB is actually one of the pioneers of live streaming and in 2011 — way before Facebook Live was even a thing — it had aired games on Facebook by embedding its MLB.tv player in its page on the platform.
Speaking on the topic, Commissioner Rob Manfred said:
It’s really important for us in terms of experimenting with a new partner in this area… we’re really excited about this new partnership.
MLB has been a fairly regular Live user and publishes all sorts of content including, special league ceremonies, behind-the-scenes footages and so on. Indeed, some of the content is pretty exclusive.
While MLB will indeed be livestreaming a lot of content, sadly, baseball fans in other countries will not be able to watch it quite yet. For now at least, the games will only live stream to users in the U.S.
Speaking on the topic, Dan Reed, Facebook’s Head of Global Sports Partnerships said:
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. By distributing a live game per week on Facebook, Major League Baseball can re-imagine this social experience on a national scale.
Facebook joins peers like Twitter, Google, Amazon and Twitch. All of these companies seem to believe that livestreaming is where content is going, and all of them have been doubling down on live content. Facebook may hold an edge due to its massive audience, but that edge will hold only as long as it can come up with regular content for its users.
