Baseball’s new TV partners deliver strong crowds on opening day(s).

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Major League Baseball’s new season — and its new media deal — is off to a strong start, with openers on Netflix and NBC hitting multi-year highs in the first week of the season.

Netflix’s broadcast of the season-opening game between the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants attracted 2.97 million US viewers, based on Nielsen big data as well as plate ratings for March 25. The next night, NBC and Peacock’s prime-time telecast of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Arizona Diamondbacks’ season-opening game drew 3.2 million viewers, according to Nielsen and Adobe Analytics numbers. Nielsen has the NBC portion of the game at 2.74 million viewers, meaning about 460,000 people watched on Peacock.

Both telecasts were the highest-grossing Opening Day primetime games since 2017, with the exception of the coronavirus-shortened 2020 season that began in July. Both Netflix and NBC can claim an “Opening Day” game, as MLB extended the first games for all 30 teams over three days last week. The Yankees and Giants played the first official game of the season, but the majority of teams began play on March 26 (with a few outliers on March 27).

Last year’s (single) season opener averaged about 1.9 million viewers on ESPN, putting the Netflix and NBC games ahead by more than 50 percent on that telecast.

Fox also put up good numbers in its season opener on Saturday. The two-game regional average averaged 2.59 million viewers, up from 45 percent over the same weekend in 2025. (A caveat to all this year’s numbers: Nielsen’s big data measurement is new for the 2025-2026 TV season, though year-over-year gains will likely go beyond a mere adjustment in methodology.)

Netflix and NBC are the league’s new television partners as part of a three-year deal that sees NBC Sports pick up Sunday night games throughout most of the season, and Netflix will also broadcast a host 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 is ESPN, which has been cutting back on its on-air broadcasts, but as part of the deal, acquired the MLB.TV streaming service, which offers subscribers every out-of-market game.

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