{"id":657481,"date":"2026-04-01T21:54:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T21:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/657481\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T21:54:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T21:54:19","slug":"mlb-opening-day-ratings-rise-on-netflix-nbc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/657481\/","title":{"rendered":"MLB Opening Day Ratings Rise on Netflix, NBC"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/t\/major-league-baseball\/\" id=\"auto-tag_major-league-baseball_1\" data-tag=\"major-league-baseball\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Major League Baseball<\/a>\u2019s new season \u2014\u00a0and its new media deal \u2014 got off to a solid start, with opening games on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/t\/netflix\/\" id=\"auto-tag_netflix_1\" data-tag=\"netflix\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Netflix<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/t\/nbc\/\" id=\"auto-tag_nbc_1\" data-tag=\"nbc\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">NBC<\/a> turning in multi-year highs for the first week of the season.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n\tNetflix\u2019s 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\u2019s big data plus panel ratings for March 25. The next night, NBC and Peacock\u2019s primetime telecast of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Arizona Diamondbacks\u2019 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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n\tBoth 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 \u201cOpening Day\u201d game, as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/t\/mlb\/\" id=\"auto-tag_mlb_1\" data-tag=\"mlb\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">MLB<\/a> 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). <\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n\tLast year\u2019s (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. <\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n\tFox 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\u2019s figures: Nielsen\u2019s big data measurement is new for the 2025-26 TV season, though the year-to-year gains likely outpace just the tweak in methodology.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n\tNetflix and NBC are new TV partners for the league as part of a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/tv\/tv-news\/nbc-netflix-mlb-rights-tv-deals-espn-1236418246\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">three-year deal<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Major League Baseball\u2019s new season \u2014\u00a0and its new media deal \u2014 got off to a solid start, with&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":657482,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5,19,4,677,40646,13435],"class_list":{"0":"post-657481","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-major-league-baseball","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-nbc","12":"tag-netflix","13":"tag-tv-ratings"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116331680018297603","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657481","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=657481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/657482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}