The MLB season kicks off Wednesday night, with the first game — the San Francisco Giants hosting the New York Yankees — broadcast exclusively on Netflix.

To watch other Opening Day games on Thursday, though, viewers will have to tune into a lot of additional places, including NBC/Peacock, Apple TV, and Fox, to name a few.

Michael Johnson grew up watching the New York Mets on ESPN with his dad.

But now, keeping up is a bit more complicated. There are still your traditional TV stations, of course.

“I watch a lot of highlights and everything through the major sports apps,” Johnson said. “I tune in when I can to the streaming of live events.”

Johnson, a research analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence who covers sports, said viewership across the major sports leagues has never been higher.

“People are piecing together different streaming subscriptions and tuning in regardless of different price points and and things like that,” he said.

That’s good news for sports leagues, which want to reach as many fans — or potential fans — as possible, said Bill Squadron, assistant professor of sport management at Elon University.

“It’s very important for the leagues to have as much exposure as possible,” he said. “The tradeoff, the balance they have to address, is when you’re on multiple platforms, can people find it? But, at the same time, you’re reaching people who use different platforms.”

For streaming services, sports do drive an uptick in subscribers, said Brendan Brady, director of strategy at the analytics company Antenna.

The challenge is keeping them in the offseason.

“It’s quite easy for the consumer to say, sign up for the start of the season and then potentially cancel at the end of the Super Bowl,” Brady said. “And I think, increasingly what we’re seeing is almost these program planning and scheduling moves in an effort to combat that dynamic.”

Brady gave Paramount+ as an example. After the football season was over, the service offered UFC and the drama “Landman” to keep those viewers subscribing.

Broadcast rights don’t come cheap, but Brady said sports are the closest thing streamers have to a home run.

“It can be a risky proposition, inherently, to take a bet on a scripted piece of programming, right? A net new idea that comes from the brain of some brilliant creator,” he said.

Something like live sports, Brady said, requires an investment but already has a built-in audience — for the game, and for advertisers.

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