Social media platform Twitter has renewed its rights deal with Major League Baseball for the 2018 season.
The agreement allows Twitter to live stream one day game per week, only in the US. The rights are not exclusive with the weekly stream being a simulcast of a participating team’s local television broadcast.
The first game for the 2018 season will be tomorrow’s (Thursday’s) meeting between the Oakland Athletics and Texas Rangers, with out-of-market live streaming provided by Twitter. The company first began offering live MLB games in 2016 and will continue to offer real-time game highlights in English and Spanish.
Rival platform Facebook last month struck a deal with MLB to stream live coverage of 25 weekday afternoon games.
Under the exclusive agreement, the games are available to Facebook users in the US through Facebook Watch, a video feature that was launched by the social media platform last August, via the MLB Live page.
Franchises will be blocked from showing those games on their regional sports channels, with the selected contests being those that teams can lose from their local broadcast platform to national partners. Recorded coverage will also be made available on a global basis, excluding specific markets.