Boston, MA – October 2, 2016 – Fenway Park: Mookie Betts (50) of the Boston Red Sox during a regular season game. (Photo by Scott Clarke / ESPN Images)
Boston Red Sox fans in New England will finally be able to watch Mookie Betts hit home runs from their smartphones.
The New England Sports Network (NESN) announced Tuesday it will begin to provide fans live in-market streaming of all NESN-televised regular season Red Sox games through the new NESNgo app and NESNgo.com, after a technical glitch delayed the feature for the first few weeks of the season.
The feature, spawned from a February licensing agreement between NESN and Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM), will be available to subscribers at no additional cost who already pay to have NESN broadcast through their traditional television providers.
“Live in-market streaming will provide Red Sox fans who are on the go a means to watch games anytime, anywhere they go, on virtually any device,” NESN CEO Sean McGrail said in a statement.
Through the app, fans can watch NESN 24 hours a day. That includes Red Sox pregame and postgame coverage, Red Sox games and the network’s entire programming lineup with the exception of Bruins telecasts. The sports network did not say when Bruins games would also be available.
The programming will be available throughout most of New England, excluding Fairfield County in Connecticut. Xfinity Comcast, Cox Communications, MetroCast, PlayStation Vue and RCN all offer NESN streaming to subscribers right now, and other providers not on that list plan to authenticate NESN streaming in the coming weeks, said McGrail.
This is a big deal for fans in the Boston area, which has been among one of the last major markets unable to stream regular season games for the 2017 season. Fans outside of NESN’s territory may have been able to watch games online through MLB.TV, which is a premium streaming platform. But fans in New England were blacked out from streaming their own games.
Streaming capabilities were expected to begin with the Red Sox season opener the first week of April, but “technical issues” delayed it until this week, according to SportsBusiness Daily.
This, of course, comes amid widespread instances of MLB streaming on a wide variety of platforms. Last week, Facebook announced that it partnered with MLB to stream a weekly national telecast of 20 games on Facebook Live this season. The Facebook deal, which followed a similar deal between MLB and Twitter announced last summer, suffered its own technical glitch last Friday, which led to an unplanned blackout in Washington D.C. for the live stream of the Cincinnati Reds vs. the Colorado Rockies.
Facebook told SportTechie that it was aware of the issue and is working to address it before this Friday’s game.
