MLB and Facebook kicked off its 20-game live streaming partnership on Friday night between the Cincinnati Reds and Colorado Rockies. However, a day after Commissioner Rob Manfred said at owners meetings that there would be no blackouts in the United States, those fans in Washington, D.C. were unable to view the broadcast.
A manual error related to the geographic targeting of the game resulted in the broadcast not being made available in the nation’s capital.
“Tonight’s MLB broadcast on Facebook was unintentionally not made available to people in the Washington D.C. area. We apologize for the mistake and will work to correct it for next week’s broadcast,” according to a statement from a Facebook spokesperson.
MLB declined to comment.
Each Friday night broadcast on Facebook Live is pulled from one of the team’s local broadcasts. The additional 19 live streamed games will be announced in the future.
Besides its partnership with Facebook, MLB is also currently streaming weekly out-of-market games through Major League Baseball Advanced Media’s partnership with the social platform that it signed last year. The free broadcasts are available to logged-in and logged-out users on Twitter minus certain international territories.
