(Credit: Steph Chambers/Getty Images)
The usual $149.99 price of an MLB.tv subscription will once again drop to $0 for T-Mobile subscribers, the wireless carrier announced Monday.
Subscribers to T-Mobile’s consumer and business subscriptions, its Home Internet service and its Metro by T-Mobile prepaid service can sign up for this freebie via its T Life app from Tuesday, March 26 through Monday, April 1.
T-Mobile began offering free MLB.tv in 2017 and renewed its partnership with Major League Baseball a year ago through 2028. The sophistication of this video service has advanced considerably over the last seven years, but the usefulness of MLB.tv for fans of their own city’s team has not because baseball continues to impose regional blackouts.
Those restrictions are supposed to protect regional sports networks (RSNs) that have paid a steep premium—routinely passed on to all of the subscribers of a pay-TV service, even the sportsball-apathetic ones—to carry the local franchise’s home and away games.
Many video streaming services have dropped “RSNs” to stem the exodus of inflation-weary cord cutters—leading in part to the 2024 bankruptcy filing of Sinclair Broadcast’s Diamond Sports Group and also pushing some RSNs to launch separate, direct-to-consumer streaming services at rates of $20 and up. In February, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said the league hopes to launch its own direct streaming service by 2025 that would cover at least half of the 30 major-league teams.
For this year—aside from a subset of games exempt from blackouts because they’re carried on such nationwide video options as Apple TV+ and Peacock—many T-Mobile subscribers will have to fuss with VPN services on their laptops to evade blackouts at home. Or they can “watch” via the radio.
T-Mobile’s press release notes that last year, its subscribers watched “a record high of 52 million hours” via this free option.
It also highlights a sweepstakes to win a Secret Baseball Button—described as “a Bluetooth device that connects to a laptop, allowing fans to discreetly switch from baseball to ‘work’ with the literal click of a button”—for baseball fans who have been summoned back to their employers’ offices.