Apple TV Keeps Hold of Friday Night Baseball Rights
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While a report earlier this year that Apple and MLB could be parting ways wasn’t entirely off-base about the shifting negotiations, it seems the predicted breakup didn’t happen.
MLB has just announced its 2026–28 rights agreements, confirming that Friday Night Baseball doubleheaders will remain on the Apple TV schedule for at least another three years.
In August, Yahoo Sports writer Kendall Baker reported that new rights deals were “close to being done” and would likely spell the end of Friday Night Baseball. “Apple is fully out,” Baker said.
To be fair, the sports writer added that nothing is finalized — merely that this was the way everything appeared to be leaning. He also hedged a bit in a follow-up, adding that “Apple is still a bit of a mystery.”
It’s entirely possible his intel was correct at the time — negotiations are fluid, and Apple may have secured a save in the final innings. However, it’s worth adding that this isn’t a new deal at all; the agreement was already set to run through 2028, so it would have been a pretty drastic move to cut it short.
Baker was spot-on in his other predictions. NBCUniversal beat out Apple for Sunday Night Baseball, MLB TV was sold to ESPN, and Netflix got Home Run Derby. MLB confirmed all of these today in its press release:
Sunday Night Baseball will shift from ESPN, where it aired since 1990, to NBCUniversal, which also secured the rights to Sunday Leadoff and the Wild Card Series in the postseason for NBC and Peacock.
Netflix will now air the T-Mobile Home Run Derby, an Opening Night exclusive and special event games set to include the 2026 MLB at Field of Dreams Game and the World Baseball Classic in Japan.
And ESPN will receive a national midweek game package throughout the season while also acquiring the rights to sell MLB.TV, the league’s out-of-market streaming service that set a record with 19.4 billion minutes watched in 2025.Anthony Castrovince, MLB
Apple felt like more of a footnote amidst all that, with a single sentence stating that “Apple TV will continue to stream Friday Night Baseball doubleheaders throughout the regular season.”
That’s not too surprising, since it’s a continuing media rights agreement, rather than a significant new one. MLB also added that FOX/FS1 and TBS will continue to host the games that were previously on those networks.
If anything, it seems like MLB is more interested in spreading things around as much as possible. Several insiders believed that Apple was the preferred partner for Sunday Night Baseball, due to its broader international audience — a significant advantage over NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service, which remains US-only and thereby leaves out even Toronto Blue Jays fans in Canada, much less the other foreign markets that were one of MLB’s main incentives for partnering with Apple three years ago.
The league’s focus on international growth is further evidenced by Netflix securing global rights for the World Baseball Classic. That aligns perfectly with Apple’s global footprint, a reach Peacock currently lacks.
Still, a lot can happen in three years, and the MLB’s priorities may have shifted. There are no publicly available metrics on how well Friday Night Baseball has done for the league, and there’s little doubt that Peacock can deliver more domestic eyeballs to MLB, which could be more important to the league at this point than courting more fans on the international stage.
Ironically, Apple may still get an indirect win here, as its new Apple TV and Peacock bundle will give MLB fans in the US the best of both worlds.
It’s also significant that all of these new agreements are three-year deals that now end in 2028 — the same year Apple’s does — which could suggest MLB is lining up for a bigger rights shift at that point.
