Want to watch out-of-market baseball on the regular but you’re strapped for cash because you’re a college student? Well, MLB has good news for you today!
MLB.tv is free for college students now through February (i.e., rest of the regular season, any winter league games that show, and the very start of Spring Training):
Maybe you didn’t want to PAY to watch the Cubs figure out what they’ve got going forward, but if it’s free? Hey, might as well, right? Note that MLB.tv is for out-of-market games. So if you’re in the Cubs’ blackout area (Illinois, Iowa, and parts of Indiana and Wisconsin), you can’t watch Cubs games using MLB.tv. Otherwise, you’re good to go on all other games (and you non-Cubs-market college students can watch all the Cubs games you want).
While this is a nice thing to do, let’s not pretend like this isn’t simply clever marketing: you try to get your hooks into college students now so that they get just a litttttttle more into the sport, and are slightly more likely to stick with you as they head off into the world after graduation. That could mean some direct dollars – maybe some of them subscribe going forward – and/or it could just mean the ancillary value of having more fans. Gotta keep people interested in your sport one way or another.