attendance. To preserve the value of its domestic broadcast rights and allow more games to be televised, the Premier League has added more matches in windows outside of Saturday afternoons, such as weekdays and Sundays — including the final matchday of the season. In 2018, after complying by blacking out the first 15 minutes of a Serie A match that saw Cristiano Ronaldo's on-field debut for Juventus F.C., streaming service Eleven Sports UK & Ireland began to defy the ban and show selected Serie A and La Liga matches during this period. On 17 October 2018, Eleven announced that it would cease its telecasts of 3 p.m. kickoffs, but argued that the rule was outdated because only the UK and Montenegro have such blackout rules, and that the blackout period encourages illegal streaming. A representative of La Liga has backed Eleven Sports' position. In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, UEFA authorised the suspension of the blackout rule for the remainder of the season. Upon the resumption of the 2019–20 Premier League, all matches were shown on domestic television due to them being played behind closed doors, while a number of free-to-air broadcasts (via Sky Sports sister channel Pick, Amazon Prime Video and its sister service Twitch, and the BBC — which usually holds rights to free-to-air highlights programmes) were also aired. This arrangement continued into the first month of the 2020–21 Premier League. After an attempted pay-per-view scheme folded in November 2020, the Premier League returned to allocating the matches to the four broadcasters through at least the end of 2020. United States MLB/NHL blackout policies Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League have very similar blackout rules. Unlike the National Football League, the blackout of games has nothing to do with attendance, but instead is implemented to protect broadcasters with contracts to air games. Unless one of MLB's national partners hold exclusive rights to a certain regular season game (such as ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball), the local broadcaster of a game has priority over a national broadcaster, and the national broadcast would be blacked out in markets where a local broadcaster is also showing coverage. The blackout rules do not apply during the postseason, as there are no regional television broadcasts. The NHL utilizes a similar policy of exclusive and non-exclusive national games; with the new broadcast deals enacted with 2021–22 season, all regular season games