MLB.TV Stays At Same Price, But Now Comes With Shady ESPN Charges

MLB.TV subscribers might be able to breathe a small sigh of relief that this season comes without a price hike—but there’s an ESPN catch meant to capture extra cash anyway.

While pending a formal announcement, the MLB.TV market packages have gone up on some team websites, with a price of $149.99 for the season. Monthly prices will remain at $29.99 a month (though the league has yet to write the copy for that; it simply describes them as "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur."). Single team packages will run anywhere from $99.99 a year to $129.99 a year for teams that have partnerships with cable bundles such as Spectrum LA and the YES Network, and will not be subject to the same blackout restrictions as those on the out-of-market packages (national games will continue to be subject to blackouts).

However, the legal language notes that “ESPN Unlimited is required to purchase MLB.TV.” Yet—this is where it gets tricky—they do not need to keep the subscription. In fact, customers will receive a one-month free trial of ESPN Unlimited. As the legal language notes, “ESPN subscription is not required to maintain MLB.TV subscription.”

But it’s easy to see what the game is here. MLB.TV purchases will be encouraged to try ESPN Unlimited or simply forget that they signed up for the trial. More likely, those who sign up via phone or Smart TV might not even notice the language (for now, the purchase website currently redirects to ESPN’s home page). Research suggests that over 40% of consumers forget entirely about cancelling subscription services they no longer use.

The idea is thus to “capture” any additional revenue from those who might not notice the extra charges on their credit card bills. For those in the tech world, Cory Doctorow has described this process as enshittification. For a platform, “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.” You can see enshittification in a lot of things, particularly big tech. And for years, it has been almost impossible to argue against MLB.TV as a product is about more than blackouts, which are slowly being fixed as cable giants forgo streaming rights. But this ESPN backend does seem like part of the future. What happens next year, for example, for those who canceled ESPN Unlimited? Do they still get a free trial? Or do they need to pay up an extra $30 just “to purchase” MLB.TV?

All this is the result of the new TV deals Manfred struck, which essentially kept the same amount of league profits while increasing the product to do so. When Manfred decided to break the ESPN deal, the league perhaps presumptuously thought it could get something better. This resulted in NBC signing the rights for Sunday Night Baseball and Netflix securing the Home Run Derby among a newly restructured deal with ESPN. ESPN ended up signing for the same amount of money, but for a different set of games in addition to full rights to put MLB.TV in their system. At that point, that included the standard out-of-market package and seven dedicated team channels. But since then, the collapse of Main Street Spots Group has resulted in that increasing to fourteen teams and potentially soon sixteen—all at no additional cost by ESPN to the league.

It was never clear what the relationship between MLB and ESPN would be, as MLB.TV became one of its flagship products. For now, we’re getting a sense of what it might mean: more money for the same service by any means necessary.