How ZIVO works

Everything begins with the game itself: teams, kickoff time, league, and status, assembled from public sports-data sources. Both are public and require no streaming-service data, which is deliberate — ZIVO doesn't scrape streaming catalogs to build a schedule.

Each fixture is given a stable identity so the same game resolves to the same answer across searches, reminders, and pages.

A single availability flag can't describe sports rights, because a game can be watchable on one service and blacked out on another at the same time. ZIVO models three services independently and reports their union:

• Cable or regional sports network (RSN) direct — watching a team's local network, such as YES or SNY, through a cable, satellite, or live-TV streaming subscription, or the network's own app.
• The league streaming app — for MLB, MLB.TV. It's subject to the league's own blackout rules, including home television territory and national windows.
• National broadcast direct — the national network or streamer itself, such as Apple TV+, ESPN/ABC, FOX, NBC/Peacock, or TBS, for the games it carries.

The league's own availability data describes streaming eligibility on the league's app, not whether a person can watch the game at all.

On a Yankees home game, MLB's feed can label the team's own network as "out of market" — not because the game is unavailable, but because in-territory viewers are expected to get that network through a TV provider rather than stream it on MLB.TV.

Treating that label as a viewer-facing blackout would be wrong for the games where it matters most. That's why cable/RSN direct and the league streaming app are modeled as separate services with their own rules.

Because national exclusivity and home-territory blackout act on different services, there is no single "national beats local beats default" chain. Each service resolves on its own terms, and national-exclusive windows are the one case that can reach across them.

A confirmed example is Apple TV+ Friday Night Baseball, which blacks out the league's streaming app and preempts the local RSN feed.

Whether some other national windows also preempt the RSN feed isn't established by the league's own published policy, so ZIVO records those as unknown rather than assuming either way. When a rule's effect isn't confirmed, the answer says so.

Availability is resolved ahead of a game's start from the rules in effect, not assembled after the fact. ZIVO's approach grew out of a validation exercise that made every prediction at least 24 hours before first pitch and scored it against ground truth that was collected by hand and never derived from the predictions themselves.

That separation still shapes the product: rules are versioned, every rule is meant to carry a source, and a game ZIVO can't confidently resolve is more interesting than one it gets right by luck.

ZIVO resolves availability at country level. Where a route depends on a finer market — the exact territory a team claims, which is keyed to ZIP codes and does not line up with common market definitions — ZIVO marks the answer market-dependent instead of guessing.

A precise, address-level answer would need licensed territory data that ZIVO doesn't currently use. Until then, the honest output is the routes it can verify plus an explicit note when the finer detail matters.

ZIVO won't scrape a streaming service's catalog, won't touch video or DRM, and won't advise on how to evade a blackout. The answer is a set of legitimate, sourced places to watch, and nothing more.