Details of Twins’ broadcast streaming partnership with MLB are revealed

Under the Twins’ new broadcast partnership with MLB, the team’s fans will be able to watch baseball on their streaming devices during the upcoming season in packages of 25-30 games, or roughly 150 — or 2,430, more or less.

The price? As with other teams that have aligned with MLB.TV, it will cost $19.99 per month, or $99.99 per season, for every Twins game on the new Twins.TV stream, free of blackouts.

“That’s less than one dollar per game for the entire season,” outgoing Twins President Dave St. Peter said Friday. “It’s a truly momentous development for our franchise and, most importantly, for our fans.”

Season-ticket holders can buy the TV package at half price.

The season package doesn’t include the handful of games broadcast by MLB’s other subscription-based partners like Amazon Prime or FS1. But the team and MLB also plan to offer a combo package that includes MLB.TV’s broadcasts of all other games around the league, more than 2,300 of the scheduled 2,430 MLB games per season.

The price for that subscription has yet to be announced, and non-Twins games will still be subject to local blackouts based on where the subscriber is located. But for fans in Minnesota, it means blackouts will never be a problem.

And for Twins fans in surrounding states, for decades blacked out on cable because they’re in the team’s “media territory” despite not having access to a cable system that carries Twins games, streaming will finally bring those games into their homes.

“For the first time ever, there will be no streaming blackouts for Twins.TV in Minnesota, no blackouts in North Dakota, no blackouts in South Dakota, no blackouts in western Wisconsin and no blackouts in the entire state of Iowa,” St. Peter said. “With the direct-to-consumer option of Twins.TV, our broadcasts will now [potentially] reach 4.4 million homes, a 307 percent increase from the 2024 season.”

The Twins will begin selling subscriptions Feb. 11, St. Peter said. At least five spring training games will also be available for streaming, free of charge, so fans can experience what the new broadcasts — produced entirely by MLB’s broadcast department, with Cory Provus handling play-by-play for a second season — will be like.

Friday’s announcement, St. Peter said, was also intended to put to rest any speculation that the Twins would return to their former sports network, now renamed FanDuel Sports North, which still broadcasts Timberwolves and Wild games.

MLB is negotiating carriage agreements with cable systems like Comcast, and satellite carriers, to create a channel for Twins games to be broadcast to subscribers, with announcements expected before Opening Day.

As positive as the streaming option is for fans, the move away from their former network comes at a steep cost for the Twins. In 2023, the team collected $54 million in revenue from Bally Sports North, largely because cable systems charged fans a monthly fee for the channel whether they watched it or not.

For the time being, there is no hope of approaching that level of income from the new streaming arrangement. The San Diego Padres, for instance, offered their games via streaming last season at the exact price point the Twins are offering them and, according to MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, signed up roughly 40,000 subscribers. That works out to only $4 million in revenue at most.