T-Mobile is once again providing the equivalent of free roaming for baseball fans: a comped account to Major League Baseball’s MLB.TV service, which limits live streaming of games to those in other markets that don’t involve your own city’s team.
The carrier’s description of this freebie, a $149.99 value, notes that limit in bold type: “With the MLB.TV app, you can watch out-of-market regular season games on your phone, TV, or tablet—and listen to live audio for all MLB teams.”
Subscribers to eligible plans, as defined on that page as “most consumer and business monthly plans that include voice and data” on T-Mobile or its Metro by T-Mobile prepaid brand, can claim this benefit via the T-Life app between 5 a.m. ET on March 24 and 4:59 a.m. on March 31.
In addition to away games that don’t involve the home team and live radio from the stations of both teams for every game, the MLB mobile app also provides increasingly sophisticated visualizations of games and free on-demand video of games 90 minutes after the last out.
The out-of-market clause in T-Mobile’s freebie was part of the deal last year and in prior years, going back to the debut of T-Mobile’s partnership with T-Mobile in 2017. The MLB app enforces regional blackouts that often extend for hundreds of miles from a team’s ballpark, though viewers on laptops have found that VPN services can evade that restriction.
But this season, MLB will now sell in-market streaming to fans of 22 teams, often at a discounted rate when bundled with MLB.TV—except accounts comped by T-Mobile aren’t eligible for that deal, the carrier confirmed.
Those discounts range from $50 for such teams as the St. Louis Cardinals and the Washington Nationals, each of which charges $99.99 for seasonal in-market viewing, to $60 for the Philadelphia Phillies, where all-season viewing runs $169.99.
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Fans can purchase those in-market subscriptions individually. However, certain games will remain exclusives of other networks and services such as ABC and ESPN, Fox and FS1, Apple TV, NBC and Peacock, MLB Network, and TBS.
Local ABC, Fox, and NBC channels are free to watch over the air with an antenna; FS1 and TBS require a streaming bundle like Sling TV; Apple TV, Peacock, and MLB Network demand separate subscriptions that you may be able to get at a discount via your carrier or ISP.
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You can also “watch” for free by listening to local sports radio coverage of games.
MLB took the step of bundling in-market streaming after the prolonged bankruptcy of Main Street Sports Group, which had operated multiple regional sports networks under the Bally Sports and then FanDuel Sports Network brands. That, in turn, followed years of RSNs finally offering in-market streaming as an alternative to requiring fans to sign up for a traditional bundle of channels.
Historically, that business model had allowed sports networks to collect other people’s money by getting pay-TV operators to include their channels in most premium tiers—with fees tacked on to advertised rates that kept increasing year after year.
In a development as predictable as the Yankees overpaying for talent, viewers grew increasingly weary of getting gouged like that and responded with a wave of cord-cutting that has now ensured that OPM is no longer a viable option for RSNs.
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