As Major League Soccer readies to step outside its bubble for its first in-market game today, ESPN announced 64 of the regular season games will be carried on ESPN+. The out-of-market broadcasts follow 31 ESPN network broadcasts of the MLS is Back Tournament, which concluded with the championship last night.
Adding MLS games will help bolster programming on the platform as it attempts to draw and keep subscribers. ESPN+ also recently received a $1 price hike, with subscriptions for new members now $6 per month. Existing users will remain at $4.99.
Disney released its 2020 second quarter earnings last week, a period in which ESPN+ gained 600,000 new users. The streaming platform now has 8.5 million paid subscribers.
A bump in subscription fees is a move to boost the revenue generated by the platform, which dropped a little more than a dollar after ESPN+ was included in a bundle with Disney+ and Hulu — also a significant reason for the nearly three-fold increase in year-over-year subscribers.
