NBCUniversal is on the brink of a three-year rights deal with Major League Baseball, but NBC Sports president Rick Cordella has his eye on a longer-term relationship.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t get in the business of baseball to do a three-year deal,\u201d Cordella said on the latest edition of the Sports Media Watch Podcast, published Monday<\/a>. \u201cThe hope is that we get in for three years, they re-jigger their packages a bit, and we can assess what content we want to buy in the future \u2014 but we\u2019re now an incumbent when those renegotiations happen, as opposed to being [on] the outside.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n NBC has been negotiating this year for a piece of the expiring ESPN MLB package that includes \u201cSunday Night Baseball,\u201d Wild Card playoff games and a handful of other inventory, but several other properties \u2014 including the three main rounds of playoffs \u2014 are currently spoken for by incumbents Fox Sports and TNT Sports.<\/p>\n All of the MLB national media rights, and potentially all of the league\u2019s local rights, will come up for bid in 2028.<\/p>\n Last year, NBCU was unable to bid on the NBA Finals, which had already been earmarked for ESPN during the incumbent\u2019s exclusive negotiating window. \u201cThe NBA kind of dictated what was available to us, and unfortunately, the NBA Finals was already spoken for, so we never had an opportunity to really bid against that.\u201d<\/p>\n As an incumbent with MLB in 2028, NBCU would presumably have an opportunity to bid on MLB rights before they hit the open market. But when asked whether NBC might have interest in a World Series, Cordella said it was not a possibility to which he had given much thought. \u201cI don\u2019t know if that opportunity will present itself. I don\u2019t know if that opportunity is going to be too expensive or makes sense with where our schedule or our calendar is. So I have not thought one second about acquiring the World Series, but if the opportunity presents itself, I\u2019m sure we\u2019d create a financial model on it and say, \u2018does it make sense for NBCUniversal?’\u201d<\/p>\n In the meantime, NBCU is poised to become the home of \u201cSunday Night Baseball\u201d and Wild Card playoff games starting next season, giving the company a year-round slate of Sunday night sports between the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very easy concept to understand that we\u2019re going to have the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball \u2014 the three biggest professional sports in America \u2014 having the best players, the best matchups, great production on Sunday nights,\u201d Cordella said. \u201cYou know before the work week begins and you\u2019re a little weary on Sunday night, you can turn your channel to NBC and get a game that\u2019s worthy of your attention. We feel like that\u2019s a concept that consumers and the sports fans can easily understand. So we\u2019re pretty excited about that.\u201d<\/p>\n Cordella confirmed that the MLB games will slot in on NBC between the bookends of \u201cSunday Night Football\u201d in the fall and \u201cSunday Night Basketball\u201d and NBA playoff games in the spring. \u201cSo if it\u2019s not on Sunday nights on NBC, you\u2019ll probably see those games on Peacock. And there are other games throughout the year that we haven\u2019t announced yet that will be on Peacock as well, and there\u2019ll be other games throughout the year that will be on NBC. So it\u2019s not just Sunday nights on NBC. We\u2019ll try and find other windows for baseball to be on the network.\u201d<\/p>\n That will reportedly include a primetime game on the second night of the season, and could also include the Sunday morning package of games that currently airs on Roku, and which NBCUniversal previously aired from 2022-23.<\/p>\n In the podcast, which was published Monday, Cordella also addressed the relaunch of NBCSN<\/a>, the return of the NBA on NBC, NFL\u2019s plan to renegotiate its media rights deals ahead of schedule<\/a>, and additional topics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NBCUniversal is on the brink of a three-year rights deal with Major League Baseball, but NBC Sports president…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272287,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2290],"tags":[5,11850,14495],"class_list":{"0":"post-381474","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-baseball","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-mlb-media-rights","10":"tag-mlb-on-nbc-peacock"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/115378800448709776","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}