MLB.com and the National Hockey League (NHL) today announced a partnership that will make available each league’s live online streaming product, MLB.TV Premium and NHL GameCenter LIVE, respectively, through a bundled subscription. This special bundle for United States residents will be available for a one-time fee of $139.95 beginning Monday, February 16 at MLB.com and NHL.com.

Earlier this month, MLB.TV went on-sale with its full-season package (March-October 2009) for $109.95, a $10 discount off the 2008 yearly pricing, and the NHL will launch its standalone Race for the Cup streaming product on February 16 for $79.95.

This first-of-its-kind content partnership will allow subscribers to watch every regular season game, more than 100 Spring Training games and the first two rounds of the World Baseball Classic in 2009, via MLB.com, and up to 40 out-of-market NHL games per week for the remainder of the current regular season as well as select Stanley Cup Playoffs games, via NHL.com (blackout and other restrictions apply).

“We believe this partnership with the NHL is an important initial step in the future of online subscription programming for valuable content providers,” said Bob Bowman, MLB.com President and Chief Executive Officer.

“We couldn't be more excited about this tremendous opportunity to introduce our groundbreaking NHL Game Center LIVE experience to an even bigger audience,” said NHL Chief Operating Officer John Collins. “MLB.com has built a great business by engaging their audience with a best-in-breed product. This partnership is all about our mutual commitment to deliver world class digital sports experiences to sports fans everywhere.”

MLB.TV, now in its seventh season with over a million total subscribers since its inception and 500,000 in 2008 alone, will introduce significant upgrades to its Premium product in 2009. The new MLB.TV Premium will feature proprietary speed detection allowing a hi-definition quality picture on any screen size; live game DVR functionality; live game picture-in-picture capabilities; multi-game viewing options; home and away feeds for every available game; live game radio option; and real-time player tracker alerts for live at-bat look-ins.

(see more on new features for MLB.TV)

NHL GameCenter LIVE streams up to 40 games per week (blackout and other restrictions apply), and is specifically designed for those avid fans looking for the most complete, in-game NHL viewing experience, as well as for the nearly 50 percent of NHL fans that live away from their favorite team’s local television market and crave more live game coverage. NHL GameCenter LIVE surrounds these avid hockey fans with TV-quality streaming video, multiple and exclusive camera angles, multi-games views, real-time stats, chat and much more.

(see more on GameCenter LIVE on The Biz of Hockey)

Source: MLB.com

Comments (5)

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written by barrydel, February 09, 2009

"One-time?" Does that mean what it says, or is it a misleading way of saying "once a year?"

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Blackout restrictions still make the service mostly useless.
written by mpp, February 09, 2009

MLB.TV used to charge every year. Their auto-rebilling (and the ha*sle they made you go through to cancel) put them on the top 10 list of bad companies to do business on a few consumer protection websites about a year or to back. To their credit, they have at least added the option to not rebill when you order, at least that was the case when I last bought a video service from MLB.

The bigger issue is the blackout restrictions. As long as they are so eager to block fans from watching any hometown team then the service is only useful to fans who live outside the viewing area of their hometown team.

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Fan
written by prof_farnsworth, February 10, 2009

I was a subscriber last year and the blackouts are what caused me to cancel.

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question
written by Rdevils21, February 10, 2009

Does this mean since I already have the nhl online I get the mlb package as well? Not so clear on that.

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written by donaldc, February 10, 2009

I've had it with the blackouts by MLB.tv. It makes absolutely no sense to blackout the early games starting at 1:00pm (eastern) on Saturdays since most games would be finished long before the 4:00pm start for the Fox games. That combined with the absolutely stupid, arcane, illogical blackouts other games such as blacking out San Diego Padre games to 1/2 of Phoenix and letting them be available to the other 1/2 Phoenix is just ridiculous. MLB says there's 2,130 games available to subscribers. By my calculations, there are at least 400 of those games I cannot see here in Phoenix because of the blackout of Diamondbacks' and Padres' games plus the Saturday early games so where's the value???

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