The debut of Major League Baseball on Netflix set an MLB Opening Night viewership mark, albeit one that lasted about 24 hours.
Last Wednesday’s Yankees-Giants Major League Baseball Opening Night game averaged a 1.3 rating and 2.97 million viewers on Netflix, which at the time marked the largest audience for an Opening Night or Opening Day game since the COVID-shortened 2020 season (Yankees-Nationals: 4.01M) and the largest outside of that anomalous circumstance since 2017 (Cubs-Cardinals: 3.62M).
The Yankees’ shutout win was surpassed the following day by Dodgers-Diamondbacks on NBC, which averaged a combined 3.2 million across Nielsen (1.5, 2.74M) and Adobe Analytics. (NBC’s position is that because Nielsen does not track its streaming viewership, its combined Nielsen + Adobe audience figures are comparable to the Nielsen-only figures of other networks.)
Yankees-Giants was the first standalone Opening Night Major League Baseball game since 2015, and the Wednesday start allowed it to avoid the NCAA March Madness competition that has hampered Opening Day ratings in past years. The relatively small margin between Netflix on Wednesday night and NBC on Thursday night is at least partly due to the vastly different competition the games faced.
The game was also the first Nielsen-rated MLB telecast to air exclusively on a streaming service. MLB has for years aired games exclusively on streaming, but none have previously been rated. It was just the fifth total Netflix telecast to be rated by Nielsen, joining the streamer’s four Christmas Day NFL games over the past two seasons.
It goes without saying that viewership was nowhere close to those NFL games, or to the Netflix boxing events tracked by companies other than Nielsen. Compared to other non-NFL, Nielsen-rated, streaming-exclusive sporting events, MLB Opening Night ranks slightly behind the most-watched NBA game on Prime Video this season — the Knicks-Spurs NBA Cup Final in December (3.07M) — and ahead of last season’s most-watched NASCAR race on that service, the Coca-Cola 600 (2.72M).
As is common for sporting events on streaming services, Netflix touted the youth of its audience — noting that Yankees-Giants delivered the largest primetime Opening Day audience in adults 18-34 (636K) and 18-49 (1.38M) since 2017 (2020 excluded). But those superlatives are not particularly notable, as most of those prior primetime games would have faced the NCAA Tournament.
Among MLB Opening Week telecasts, the Netflix game ranked second in viewership ahead of Saturday’s regional window on FOX — which featured the same Yankees-Giants matchup and averaged a 1.3 and 2.59 million. That was a 45 percent increase over last year and the network’s highest for a season-opener since 2021. (Nielsen methodological changes, specifically the expansion of its out-of-home viewing sample and shift to a new methodology that combines its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes, will generally skew comparisons to past years.)
Four Opening Week windows averaged at least two million viewers — NBC’s Pirates-Mets on Opening Day had 2.3 million across Nielsen (1.2, 2.06M) and Adobe Analytics — compared to zero in the opening week of last season.
The premiere of “Sunday Night Baseball” on Peacock (Guardians-Mariners) was not Nielsen-rated. Last year’s “Sunday Night Baseball” premiere on ESPN, Braves-Padres, averaged 1.29 million.
Opening Week marked the beginning of new three-year MLB rights deals for Netflix and NBCUniversal, which acquired the various pieces of the rights package that ESPN opted out of early last year. ESPN acquired a new package of MLB rights that includes 30 exclusive game windows, the first of which airs later this month.
