Facebook and Major League Baseball announced this week a new partnership for live streaming that will show 20 regular season live games on the social network.
The games will be aired weekly on the site with the first being the aired last night between the Colorado Rockies and Cincinnati Reds.
The weekly streamed games on Facebook will be from a feed of a local broadcaster of one of the participating teams, said the two companies.
Since Facebook Live was launched, MLB has used that platform for streaming its analysis and news from both the American and National League as well as its airing on Facebook of 12:25 Live with Alexa, where it incorporates fan questions and comments into the programming.
It also has live streamed league ceremonies, footage from behind the scenes with teams and individual players as well as other shows that are aired live. It went live as well for last season’s pre- and post-game press conferences during the World Series and other World Series events.
The streaming deal just agreed to will expand beyond earlier efforts just mentioned to stream live MLB games to users on Facebook, which broadens the reach of MLB games beyond the local markets.
However, games will only be live stream for U.S. based users, noted MLB and not for baseball fans around the globe.
Competition in live-streaming has heated up the past few months, with Twitter in early May announcing a list of new shows that will air live including those from BuzzFeed, the WNBA, Viacom as well as others.
Google announced the launch of YouTube mobile living streaming and Twitch, owned by Amazon, expanded beyond its traditional content related to gaming, while Amazon has a deal to stream different NFL games as well.
For Facebook, its partnership with MLB comes after other similar efforts of bringing premium sports via live streaming to the social network. For instance, in March Facebook announced a streaming deal for live matches in Major League Soccer.
With sports being so popular across the U.S. and people out on the go, live streaming of sports on Facebook could quickly take off and become hugely popular for the social media giant.
