CLEVELAND, Ohio -- If you had trouble watching the Cleveland Guardians’ season opener against the Kansas City Royals on Thursday due to technical issues, the team wants to make it up to you.
In an email to fans on Friday, the Guardians apologized to Guardians TV subscribers “for the inconvenience to your first game viewing experience,” offering them four free upper reserved tickets to a home game of their choice in April or May, excluding the home opener on April 8, which is sold out. The team said details on how to redeem the offer will be released next week.
“We recognize despite the excitement for the start of the Guardians 2025 season the debut of CLEGuardians.TV had some technical issues early in yesterday’s game,” the email said. “There was a temporary outage impacting live game streams from across the league on MLB.TV that was resolved as soon as possible."
According to Downdetector.com, reports of outages on MLB.TV spiked to nearly 23,000 at 4:11 p.m. Thursday, when the platform was streaming 10 games simultaneously. Most of the issues appeared to be fixed by 5 p.m., as the number of reported problems dropped below 1,000.
In an email response, an MLB spokesperson did not elaborate further on the outage, except to clarify that it was not a matter of demand overwhelming capacity. They said the league would look into why some subscribers received a blackout message when trying to access the live stream.
The league launched Guardians TV after taking over the television rights from FanDuel Sports Network parent Main Street Sports Group. For $19.99 a month or $99.99 for the entire season, the new direct-to-consumer service allows local fans to stream games without a traditional cable or satellite subscription.
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Just hours before first pitch on Thursday, the team announced a deal with local cable, satellite and streaming providers to carry Guardians TV. However, the news led to frustration among some Spectrum customers who couldn’t find the game on Channel 306 or 1306, as the release had indicated, and realized the channel wasn’t included in their existing subscription.
A Spectrum spokesperson clarified on Friday that Guardians TV is included in the Spectrum TV Select Plus package for most customers or in select packages for legacy customers. Fans can check pricing in their area—$125 per month in one Cleveland suburb, for example—at spectrum.com/policies/rate-card.