Netflix’s big MLB debut

Netflix’s first live Major League Baseball telecast — the New York Yankees vs. San Francisco Giants on March 25, 2026 — averaged about 3.0 million U.S. viewers and drew the youngest Opening Day primetime audience in a decade. (about.netflix.com) (sportsmediawatch.com) Netflix pushed the game as part of a three-event slate and ran a major promotional campaign that the company says produced roughly 200 million owned global social impressions and 6 million engagements; the streamer also plans to carry the Home Run Derby on July 13 and MLB at Field of Dreams on August 13. (barrettmedia.com) (about.netflix.com) Nielsen’s measurement for the telecast is described as an “average minute audience” (AMA) — the average number of viewers watching at any given minute during the program — reported by Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel method, which combines panel-based viewing samples with larger-scale data to estimate streaming audiences; Netflix’s AMA was reported as 3.0 million in Live+Same Day viewing (live viewing plus any same-day playback). (about.netflix.com) (nielsen.com) (barrettmedia.com) By comparison, NBC/Peacock’s Dodgers‑Diamondbacks game the following night totaled about 3.2 million viewers when combining Nielsen and Adobe Analytics figures, and industry outlets note Netflix’s 2.97 million (reported as a 1.3 Nielsen rating) was the largest Opening Night/Day audience since the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and the biggest outside that anomalous year since 2017. (hollywoodreporter.com) (sportsmediawatch.com) The telecast skewed younger: Netflix reported 1.38 million viewers in the 18–49 age group and 636,000 in the 18–34 group during primetime, and industry trackers point out this was the first MLB telecast carried exclusively on a streaming service to receive Nielsen ratings, joining only a handful of other Netflix telecasts that Nielsen has rated to date. (about.netflix.com) (sportsmediawatch.com) (barrettmedia.com)