MLB’s Deals With Netflix and NBC Off to Strong Ratings Start

Netflix averaged three million viewers for its MLB opening night game between the Yankees and Giants, forming a key part of a historic opening week of viewership for the league. 

Though the Netflix game was marred by production issues and heavy promotional feel, Netflix said the broadcast generated the youngest audience for an MLB opener in a decade, excluding the pandemic-delayed start in 2020. Along similar lines, the average viewership of 1.38 million among viewers ages 18 to 49 was the best in primetime on an MLB Opening Day since 2017. 

The Netflix streaming figure was the industry-standard Nielsen measurement, mirroring how it reported its NFL viewership. Netflix had previously relied on internal metrics for some of its live events. 

Among all sports events during the week, the MLB game ranked 12th, with that list otherwise dominated by March Madness coverage on CBS and TBS.

The Yankees-Giants opener is the first of three MLB broadcasts this season by Netflix, with the Home Run Derby and Field of Dreams game happening this summer. Netflix is paying about $50 million annually to MLB. 

Big Week 

The exclusive stream on Netflix, meanwhile, was not the most-watched MLB game of the first week of the 2026 regular season. That designation went to NBC, which averaged 3.2 million viewers across NBC, Peacock, and the Spanish-language Universo for primetime coverage on March 26 of the Diamondbacks and the Dodgers. 

Combined with coverage earlier on March 26 of the Pirates and Mets, which averaged 2.3 million viewers, NBC put together the largest MLB Opening Day audience on record for a multi-game presentation on a single network. Despite going up against March Madness in primetime, the Diamondbacks-Dodgers game was also MLB’s largest Thursday audience in the first half of a season.

Among other key viewership elements of MLB’s opening week, which also saw the high-profile rollout of the automated ball-strike (ABS) system:

• Fox averaged 2.59 million viewers for its two-game opener to its 2026 MLB schedule, up 45% from the comparable weekend last year, and its best MLB season-opening telecast since 2021.
• MLB Network set a series of milestones, including coverage of a Tigers-Padres afternoon game that averaged 354,000 viewers, representing the most-watched Opening Day game in network history. It also posted similar audience records for its MLB Now and MLB Central studio shows.

Each of these figures, like anything else across U.S. television, includes the impact of Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel measurement process, along with enhanced out-of-home measurement. The year-to-year gains for baseball, however, generally outstrip these procedural improvements.