Walt Disney Stock News

Major League Baseball is nearing a finalized agreement with Disney's ESPN, Comcast's NBC Sports and Netflix on a new three-year media rights deals for packages of live games, according to people familiar with the matter. NBC would acquire all of the league's Sunday games and Wild Card playoff games for about $200 million per year.

After cutting short a previous agreement, the sides are in advanced talks on a new pact that would incorporate MLB.tv into ESPN's streaming service.

With its unmatched portfolio of intellectual property , Walt Disney (DIS -0.68%) is a household name in the world of media and entertainment. That deep roster of characters, franchises, and storylines has boosted the company's financial performance recently, giving it the resources to return capital to shareholders.

On the day ESPN is launching its much-awaited $30/month streaming app comes reports the Worldwide Leader is locking up digital rights to out-of-market games now carried on MLB.TV, and local games for five franchises.

Despite the bringing together of many different kinds of sports programming in the new ESPN+ and Fox One sports services, football superfans may still need to subscribe to multiple platforms to watch all their teams' games.

Amazon (AMZN -1.21%), Coca-Cola (KO -0.21%), and Walt Disney (DIS -0.68%) are some of the country's most popular consumer brands. They also happen to make up a tenth of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI -0.43%).

The new Disney ESPN streaming app is launching Thursday, just in time for the football season. The app will offer two subscription plans and grant access to ESPN's full content slate outside the traditional TV bundle for the first time.

Walt Disney's ESPN will deliver its full range of sports programming outside of pay TV for the first time starting on Thursday, when the network debuts an app designed to be a hub for live games and personalized news, stats and highlights.