MLB’s streaming rights are now under federal scrutiny

Major League Baseball is the next stop in the federal government’s antitrust tour of professional sports.

According to Bloomberg News, the Justice Department, which opened a formal investigation into the NFL last week over how the league licenses its broadcast rights, plans to extend that scrutiny to MLB and the other leagues operating under the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.

“You could make the argument that there’s other sports leagues out there that are potentially pushing the limits of the Sports Broadcasting Act even further than what the NFL has,” FCC chair Brendan Carr confirmed to Bloomberg, adding that his office’s focus has always been broader than the NFL. “The NFL is something that everyone is aware of and focuses on. And so I speak of it just as a shorthand, but we are focused more broadly on other leagues as well.”

In February, Carr launched a formal FCC inquiry into sports broadcasting fragmentation, centered on whether the antitrust protections in the Sports Broadcasting Act — legislation written in 1961, before cable television existed, let alone streaming — should extend to games distributed exclusively on paid platforms.

The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 grants professional sports leagues an antitrust exemption, allowing them to bundle their teams’ broadcast rights and sell them as a single national package. Carr has been openly questioning for months whether that exemption applies to games that air on streaming platforms rather than on free over-the-air broadcast television, arguing that the key triggering language in the law refers to “telecast” and may not have been intended to cover paid streaming at all.

MLB’s media landscape is now the most fragmented in the sport’s history — games split across Netflix, NBC/Peacock, ESPN, Fox, TBS, Apple TV+, and MLB Network simultaneously, the product of Manfred calling ESPN a “shrinking platform” 14 months ago, opting out of a $550 million-per-year deal, and setting off a scramble for new partners that produced a patchwork of short-term arrangements across more platforms than most fans can track. The fragmentation Manfred engineered in pursuit of maximum leverage heading into 2028 is now the evidence regulators cite when they argue that leagues have pushed their antitrust protections further than the law intended.

“One thing that did surprise me was the level of interest of baseball fans in particular,” Carr noted.

As we’ve written at length, the political context here is layered. Carr’s interest in sports fragmentation emerged alongside a moment when Fox and CBS — both controlled by families with documented ties to the Trump administration — began negotiating new NFL rights deals, with broadcast-friendly federal pressure benefiting both networks directly. That the scrutiny is now expanding to baseball suggests this was never purely about football or about any single set of negotiations.