SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter has announced plans to live stream weekly games from Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Hockey League (NHL), but existing licensing agreements will prevent most of that content from being seen here.
The company said Monday that live streams of out-of-market MLB and NHL games will be available free to logged-in and logged-out Twitter users in the United States once per week. While the NHL portion of the deal will exclude Canada, baseball fans can catch out-of-market games for all MLB teams except the Rogers-owned Toronto Blue Jays.
Twitter will also stream a new nightly sports show called The Rally, produced in partnership with American OTT network 120 Sports, but it, too, will only be available in the U.S. The MLB, NHL, and 120 Sports streaming rights come through Twitter's new partnership with MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM).
"Twitter is the fastest way to see what's unfolding in MLB and the NHL," said Twitter CFO Anthony Noto, in the news release. "MLBAM has pioneered streaming live digital video and we could not be more excited to partner with them on live games as well as 'The Rally', giving our audience the live sports events they are already talking about on one screen on Twitter."
In April, Twitter said that it would live stream select regular season games from the NFL this season, but Canada is also blocked from that deal.
