For the ninth-consecutive Major League Baseball season, T-Mobile is offering customers a pro baseball season's worth of free access to MBL.TV.

Any T-Mobile customer can claim the deal, valued at $149.99 a season, by visiting T-Mobile by EOD Monday. This season, T-Mobile hopes to build on the record 52 million hours of MLB streaming it delivered on its platform last year.

The wireless company is rolling out a new product feature called  “Secret Baseball Button,” a bluetooth-enabled tool that allows office workers and other customers constrained by "The Man" to watch baseball on the job without risk of being caught by their boss.

According to the company, one click of a button fills an MLB.TV user's screen with a tab that mimics a business-themed video call. Users can toggle right back to the game action with another button-push once the boss is gone. 

While games found in local coverage areas are not included in the plan, the MLB.TV out-of-market games streaming service still offers value for fans looking to watch as much MLB content as possible, including for teams outside their local markets.

"T-Mobile customers love baseball” said Mike Katz, president of marketing, strategy and [products for T-Mobile, in a statement. “So we wanted to do something special this year to ensure they can enjoy their free MLB.TV and all that baseball ... with a simple tap of the Secret Baseball Button.”

On top of free MLB.TV, T-Mobile customers with Magenta Status can also get free access to streaming services like Apple TV Plus, Hulu and Netflix with the company’s bundled deals.

In the small-ball world of pay TV these days, you manufacture subscriber “runs” anyway you can. And the newly rebranded Fubo is using a new marketing relationship with Major League Baseball's out-of-market games package, MLB.TV, to claim itself as the "leader in baseball coverage" ahead of Opening Day on March 30. 

Similar to NFL Sunday Ticket, the MLB.TV direct-to-consumer package lets fans stream out-of market games, both live and on-demand, and enjoy trinkets like spring training games. It’s priced at $149.99 a season or $24.99 monthly. There's also a plan that lets users follow a single team for $129.99 a season. 

MLB.TV will now be added to Fubo as an add-on package at the standard $24.99 rate. In addition to watching MLB.TV through the Fubo app, and paying for it via one Fubo bill, the virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD)’s users will also be able to stream MLB.TV games on demand via Fubo’s Lookback feature.

Fubo’s pro-baseball bullpen now includes MLB Network and MLB Strike Zone; regional sports networks including Bally Sports, which touts rights for 14 teams (at least for now); cable networks with MLB rights, including ESPN and FS1; and Big Four network Fox, which also has MLB rights. 

“With today's MLB.TV partnership, Fubo now offers the most baseball coverage of any streaming company, on top of our already leading position for local sports coverage and our robust NFL and college sports packages,“ Fubo co-founder and CEO David Gandler said. 

Much like the National League East this season, Gandler and Fubo have competition to this claim. 

They rightly claim YouTube TV has fallen back a bit on its baseball bonafides, after the Google-owned vMVPD abruptly dropped MLB Network in late January. 

But DirecTV, which just sponsored USA Baseball in the just-completed World Baseball Classic, is also marketing the hardball angle pretty stridently itself these days. 

In addition to MLB Network, DirecTV also carries RSNs including Bally Sports, broadcaster Fox, and cable channels ESPN and FS1. And notably, the operator also features Turner’s TBS, which has a weekly Tuesday night MLB game during the regular season plus a piece of the playoffs. 

For its part, Fubu reminded Next TV that it limited the scope of its semantics to merely claim "streaming" leadership. We'll be more, er, careful next time. ▪️

Major League Baseball plans to use its innovative live-streaming capabilities to present games live for four of its teams should Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Bally Sports regional sports networks stop paying their TV rights. 

According to The New York Post, should RSN rights fees suddenly stop for the teams, MLB is prepared to stream the games through MLB.tv at no cost to fans. And should everything with Bally Sports work out just fine, the league is prepared to keep the streaming service up standing permanently priced at around $15 a month. 

The Sinclair subsidiary that manages 19 Bally Sports-branded RSNs, Diamond Sports Group, is expected to enter bankruptcy protection as soon as Thursday. Sinclair and Diamond have more than $9 billion in debt tied to the Bally Sports channels, and they want to restructure their deals with banks, teams and pro leagues. 

Also: Bally Sports Bankruptcy in the Windup: Sinclair’s Diamond Misses the Pitch Clock on Its Arizona Diamondbacks TV Rights Payment

According to the Post, it's very possible that Diamond will stop paying TV rights fees to four Major League Baseball teams it is losing money on as it attempts to restructure rights deals: the Cincinnati Reds, San Diego Padres, Cleveland Guardians and Arizona Diamondbacks.

The MLB season starts March 30. 

On Friday, Diamond Sports conceded that it failed to pay its latest rights fee to the Diamondbacks on time. 

Diamond said it “exercised a contractual grace period in order to maximize flexibility, especially given that we do not have DTC rights. We are continuing to broadcast games and are operating our business as usual.”

Also: Rob Manfred Leads MLB Into a Season of Changes 

According to numerous published reports, Diamond is losing $20 million alone each season on its Padres deal. 

And on top of that, Diamond faces crucial pay TV carriage renewal negotiations later this year with No. 1 pay TV operator Comcast and No. 3 sized company DirecTV. 

At a press conference to mark the beginning of Spring Training in Phoenix last month, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said his league would indeed terminate Bally Sports deals and step in with an alternative TV plan should rights payments be interrupted. 

One thing to keep in mind: MLB, along with Bally Sports’ other major sports league partners, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, make far more money showing their games in the pay TV ecosystem, eroded such as it is. 

Negotiations with Diamond and Sinclair are ongoing and likely heated at this very moment. Stand by for more. ▪️

Celebrities take turns trying to hit homers in MLB Originals’ new talk show and competition series Celebrity Sluggers, produced with Team Whistle’s Magnet unit.

Launched this week, the six-episode series is hosted by internet personality Hannah Stocking, who has more than 50 million social media followers. Her guest hitters are Brandon Perea, JoJo Siwa, D’Arcy Carden, Aubrey Plaza, Charli D’Amelio and Xolo Maridueña. 

Stocking interviews the celebrity sluggers in the middle of a baseball diamond. She then tests their batting skills with a pitching machine that speeds up as the show goes on. Batters aim to knock the ball over the fence or hit targets to earn points and win money for charity.

Celebrity Sluggers is available on Major League Baseball's YouTube channel, MLB.TV and Facebook.

“We are always looking to connect with our fans beyond the game on the field and that means developing entertaining programming with unique content that is baseball-adjacent,” MLB senior VP of creative and content marketing Scott Weisenthal said. “Celebrity Sluggers features some of today’s bright young stars and we’re excited to connect baseball and culture through this new series.”

Team Whistle launched Magnet to create sports-focused social media content aimed at Gen Z and millennial consumers.

“Magnet exists to help our partners create original content conceived for and tailored to audiences across social channels,” said Danielle Johnsen Karr, head of Magnet. “We were thrilled to work with MLB to create a series that delivers authentic content and brings new excited audiences.”  ■

Comcast has announced support for Major League Baseball subscription OTT platform MLB.TV on its Xfinity Flex app.

The support comes as the league preps its April 1 Opening Day. The app lets MLB fans stream out-of market games, both live and on-demand, and enjoy trinkets like spring training games. It’s priced at $129.99 a season or $24.99 monthly. There’s also a $109.99 option to follow just one team’s out-of-market games for a full season. 

MLB.TV has support for most significant platforms, but the addition of Flex fills a hole in the ol’ infield. 

Also Read: Comcast’s Mike Cavanagh: Flex Is Reducing Broadband Churn by 15%-20%

As for Xfinity Flex, Comcast offers the device platform free to its broadband-only customers. It recently touted its 3 millionth Flex deployment, and it’s seriously mulling the prospect of distributing the platform out of footprint to compete with Roku, Amazon and Google. 

The 4K-capable Flex shares many of the same features as Comcast’s flagship Xfinity X1 video system, including voice control. So yes, users can say “MLB app” in their voice controller, and the app will surface. 

The past decade’s promise of digital convergence is manifesting in live streaming of major sports events attracting record audiences via smartphones, tablets, game consoles and PCs.

Consumers are taking advantage of TV everywhere and OTT streaming services that sports leagues and networks offer in increasing numbers, with mobile views augmenting the longer established out-of-market pay TV offerings.

“League Pass continues to grow, even as we introduced new packages,” David Denenberg, the National Basketball Association’s senior vice president of global media distribution, business affairs, told Multichannel News. “We’re focused on serving our fans no matter what platform they have with them.”

Full-season subscription-TV packages like NBA League Pass, Major League Baseball’s MLB.TV and the National Hockey League’s NHL GameCenter Live serve transplanted sports enthusiasts in out-of-market locations who want to keep following their hometown teams.

Digital extensions from the leagues have bolstered those services, leagues said. The NBA this season even added single-game pay streams. (The leagues won’t divulge the number of digital subscriptions, other than they’ve increased steadily.)

League and network officials don’t seem especially concerned about business-model-busting moves such as the live-streaming deal Twitter reached with the National Football League to stream 10 free games from its Thursday Night Football package.

“I have a hard time thinking that the best way to stream content to the masses is digital-only product,” said Rick Cordella, NBC Sports Group senior vice president and general manager, digital media. “There’s no power like broadcast television. We’re not going to make our content freely available.”

When NBC streamed in 2008 for the first time the Olympic Games, in Beijing, “We took a very cautious approach,” Cordella said. “The biggest fear initially was cannibalization: instead of people watching on a big screen TV on the wall, they would then watch on an iPhone or a desktop computer. Really that’s never the case.”

For NBC, the key to streaming live is authentication; users must prove they’re either a cable or satellite subscriber. “We’re part of the ecosystem, a larger machine. We think it’s the right model,” Cordella said.

That goes for anything that NBC broadcasts over the air, as well as NBCSN, the Golf Channel and regional sports networks, such as local NBA games, and NBC’s partnership with Telemundo’s Deportes, totalling 7,000-8,000 hours of content a year, not including the Olympics, which is another 4,500 hours. In mid-April, the first week of the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup Playoffs scored for NBC Sports an 84% bigger digital audience than last year, Cordella said.

“Digital streaming attracts young affluent males who are tech-savvy and forward leaning: an attractive demographic to reach for advertisers,” Cordella said, adding that digital has its own ad load often with different creative even though they might be some of the same advertisers on-air. “In some case [advertisers] pay a premium to reach it.”

Livestream growth also is evident in other sports, such as soccer, golf and tennis.

The NeuLion-powered Major League Soccer service, MLS Live, grew its subscription base by 60% in 2015, according to Chris Wagner, executive vice president and co-founder of NeuLion.

NeuLion overall delivered OTT 63,000 live sports streams in 2015 and 30% higher video traffic than the previous year, Wagner said.

The new OTT product Univision Now, directed at 57 million Spanish U.S.-based speakers, expects digital traffic this June for the 32-match Copa America Centenario soccer tournament, involving national teams from North America and South America to be a bigger streaming deal than the 2014 FIFA World Cup was for Univision, he said.

“TV is still going to have the majority of [all sports] audiences,” Wagner said.

But digital is making inroads.

SIDEBAR: Sports Streaming Milestones

• Viewers of CBS Sports’s live stream of Super Bowl 50 consumed more than 402 million total minutes of coverage across laptops, desktops, tablets, connected TV devices and mobile phones, watching for more than 101 minutes each on average. During the game window, viewers consumed more than 315 million minutes of coverage, with an average minute audience of 1.4 million.

• NBA League Pass, the NBA’s live out-of-market subscription package, delivered a record 27 million video views and 1.2 billion total minutes viewed during the 2015-16 regular season. Globally, NBA.com and the NBA app netted a record 9.1 billion video views this season, up 160% over last year, and 3 billion visits, for a 27% year-over-year increase.

• This year’s NCAA March Madness Live, managed by Turner, garnered 73.5 million live streams and 18.1 million hours of live video consumption. When comparing this year with 2010, live streaming is up 84% and hours of live video consumption are up 54%.

• MLB Advanced Media’s At Bat app in 2015 established record levels of engagement including 13.1 million downloads (+21% YOY), 1.7 billion app starts (+40% YOY) and 8.4 billion minutes.

• WrestleMania 32-related content garnered more than 250 million video views across WWE.com, the WWE app and social media, (+122% YOY), setting a data traffic record of 8.6 TB on the AT&T network.

• Golf Channel Digital achieved its best week ever with The Masters from April 7–10, 2016 for total video starts (3.2 million) and total unique users (4 million). Additionally, Golf Live Extra saw a 23% increase in streaming coverage over 2015 for Golf Central Live From The Masters coverage, the best ever for Masters Week.

•CSN Bay Area Digital set a network record with 3.19 million minutes streamed for the historic 73rd regular-season Golden State Warriors win over the Memphis Grizzlies, surpassing the previous high, last Sunday’s Warriors-San Antonio Spurs game (3.15 million minutes streamed). For the full season, fans consumed 96.1 million minutes on CSNBayArea.com and via NBC Sports Live Extra (through 70 games), up 443% compared to the 2014-15 championship season.

• The NBC Sports section of Yahoo Sports delivered 3.5 million minutes in March, up 30% over March 2015, according to multiplatform data released by comScore.

Despite not offering live game streams, NFL Game Pass is the most highly adopted sports OTT subscription service, according to a new study from Parks Research.

The study, based on a Q4 2015 survey of 10,000 U.S. broadband homes, found that 16% of all U.S. broadband homes subscribe to an over-the-top sports service.

NFL Game Pass is present in about 6% of U.S. broadband homes, followed by 4% for the WWE Network and MLB.tv.

Notably, the highest proportions of those surveyed said they signed up for a sports service via a TV provider, with 63% of NFL Game Pass taking that path, Parks Associates found.

“For sports content owners, OTT is a viable way to expand audience reach, but there are technical issues to consider,” Glenn Hower, research analyst at Parks Associates, said in a statement. “The user experience is of paramount importance to the viewer for sports content. The lead established by the NFL speaks to popularity of football, and the league’s service has avoided a major hurdle since it does not stream live games.”

TBS recently joined the OTT ranks with plans to launch its own eSports league in partnership with WME/IMG.

The lineup for Google’s popular Chromecast streaming adapter is still small, but it’s growing.

The latest service to be optimized for the device is MLB.TV, the out-of-market Major League Baseball streaming service that features both yearly and monthly subscription plans.

The Chromecast joins an already massive list of devices and platforms that support MLB.TV, including iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 8, PC browsers, Playstation 3 and PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, Roku, Apple TV, and TiVo.  MLB.TV will be “coming soon” to the new Amazon Fire TV.  

In addition to MLB.TV, the Chromecast now supports Rdio, VUDU, Photowall, Crackle, Netflix, HBO GO, Hulu Plus, Pandora, YouTube, Google Play TV & Movies, Google Play Music, Vevo, Red Bull.TV, Songza, Plex, PostTV, Viki, and RealPlayer Cloud. Users can also cast a Chrome browser tab from their PCs or laptops to the TV.

Aereo, which is preparing to defend itself at the Supreme Court on Tuesday, April 22, announced last week that its broadband TV and cloud DVR service will be “Google Cast Ready” on May 29.

The number of apps and services for the Google Chromecast is expected to rise significantly following the February release of the Google Cast Software Development Kit. During Google’s earnings call this week, company SVP and chief business officer Nikesh Arora said more than 3,000 developers worldwide have signed up to bring their apps and Web sites to the Chromecast platform.