Jazz Chisholm Jr. (13) of the New York Yankees steals second base against Willy Adames of the San Francisco Giants on March 25. Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images Logo text Major League Baseball’s new season — and its new media deal — got off to a solid start, with opening games on Netflix and NBC turning in multi-year highs for the first week of the season.
Netflix’s telecast of the season-opening game between the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants drew 2.97 million U.S. viewers, based on Nielsen’s big data plus panel ratings for March 25. The next night, NBC and Peacock’s primetime telecast of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Arizona Diamondbacks’ season opener drew 3.2 million viewers, per Nielsen and Adobe Analytics figures. Nielsen has the NBC portion of the game at 2.74 million viewers, which would mean about 460,000 people watched on Peacock.
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Both telecasts were the highest opening day primetime games since 2017, excluding the COVID-shortened 2020 season that began in July. Netflix and NBC can each lay claim to an “Opening Day” game, as MLB stretched out the first games for all 30 teams over three days last week. The Yankees and Giants played the official first game of the season, but the majority of teams began play on March 26 (with a few stragglers on March 27).
Last year’s (single) season opener averaged about 1.9 million viewers on ESPN, putting both the Netflix and NBC games more than 50 percent ahead of that telecast.
Fox also put up good numbers for its inaugural Saturday primetime game of the season. Its two-game regional slate averaged 2.59 million viewers, up from 45 percent from the same weekend in 2025. (A caveat for all of this year’s figures: Nielsen’s big data measurement is new for the 2025-26 TV season, though the year-to-year gains likely outpace just the tweak in methodology.)
Netflix and NBC are new TV partners for the league as part of a three-year deal that has NBC Sports taking Sunday night games for much of the season and Netflix streaming a handful of events, including the season opener and the Home Run Derby during the All-Star break. Fox Sports, TNT Sports and Apple remain MLB media partners. So does ESPN, which is scaling back its on-air telecasts but as part of the deal acquired streaming service MLB.TV, which offers subscribers every out of market game.
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