Baseball Everywhere: How MLB Is Innovating With Digital Media

**Waqas** · August 26, 2011

On August 26, 1939, Major League Baseball did something historic: It broadcast on televisions for the first time. It’s not known how many people tuned into see that telecast, a doubleheader between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds, though it couldn’t have been many since only a few hundred people reportedly owned television sets in the New York area at the time. That Major League Baseball would jump on such a novel technology is not surprising, however. It had begun broadcasting games on the radio 18 years earlier, when commercial radio was still in its infancy.

And the league’s first livestream Internet broadcast of a game occurred on August 26, 2002. Though the Internet certainly had more penetration in 2002 than television did 63 years earlier, at the time the vast majority of Internet users were still on dial-up, and even those on broadband technology, like Cable or DSL, were connecting at just fractions of the bandwidth available to users today.

Over the past 10 seasons, MLB has continued to innovate in the digital space, and is a market leader when it comes to online media. From the successful launch of an impressive suite of mobile apps to the continued improvement of its market-leading MLB.tv service to the continued expansion of the MLB.com property, the league has shown a strong commitment to using digital technology to give fans increased access.

The Catalyst

Major League Baseball’s renewed commitment to digital media can really be traced to January 19, 2000, when the 30 Major League Baseball club owners voted unanimously to centralize the league’s digital operations under one company. That lead to the formation of MLB Advanced Media LP (MLBAM) six months later. The company, which is jointly owned by the team owners, manages MLB.com, the team sites for each of the 30 clubs and all of their mobile and multimedia applications.

One of the unique decisions the new company made early on was to run their flagship properties — the team sites and MLB.com, which launched under MLBAM on Opening Day, 2001 (fun fact: MLB had to secure the MLB.com domain name from their own lawyers) — as editorial destinations, rather than marketing or promotional vehicles. Each team site has a beat writer who covers his team much like any other member of the press corps.

“We have the most journalists and editors covering baseball of any media outlet in the world and all have brought with them a wealth of experience and expertise as news reporters,” explained Matthew Gould, vice president of corporate communications at MLBAM. “Our beat reporters work under the same guidelines as every local beat reporter, establishing professional relationships and credibility with sources and readers, with the ultimate goal of providing comprehensive, accurate coverage of their respective clubs.”

Gould credits MLB commissioner Bud Selig with the editorial vision behind MLB.com. According to Gould, Selig and the league realized early on that digital media could add tremendous value for the teams, but that it only worked if content was original and compelling to fans. “Commissioner Selig, from the outset, insisted the websites not merely serve as a marketing tool for the industry, and the key to that was establishing editorial independence that allowed us to write what we wanted, when we wanted,” says Gould.

That strategy seems to have paid off — MLB.com now averages 10 million visitors per day and 120 million pageviews per day.

Giving Fans What They Want

Starting in 2002, MLB began broadcasting livestreams of games over the Internet. The technology was rudimentary at first — 280k streams without much in the way of extras — but has grown up considerably over the past decade. MLB currently serves up 9 million video streams each day, including 1 million live streams. Additionally, they have 2 million paid subscribers to MLB.tv and their At Bat mobile apps (which also stream video).

For many professional sports leagues, complicated television rights or fears that Internet streaming would eat into lucrative TV broadcasts have hampered the availability of Internet streaming. For Major League Baseball, which was able to overcome the complexity of a broadcast rights landscape scattered over 30 local markets, the fears of audience fragmentation have been overblown.

“Weâ€™ve learned that wherever you are, you watch on the biggest screen you can,” MLBAM CEO Robert Bowman told The New York Times in 2008. In other words, MLB.tv won’t cut into TV revenue, according to Bowman, because most viewers will opt for TV over their computer or iPhone if the broadcast is available to them.

Gould echoes his boss’s sentiments. “The history of media shows us that no medium ever has died as new technology emerges, going back to terrestrial radio. Every one builds from the other, and they all provide complementary opportunities,” he says. “Our most important objective is to expand the experiences through interactive media so a fan that has a few minutes to watch a live game on-the-go, at work or wherever easily can do so. We have to get it there, get it right and have it ready for them to consume.”

And that’s one of the major keys to MLBAM’s success over the past decade. By embracing new technologies as they’ve appeared (the iPhone in 2008, Android, BlackBerry and the iPad in 2010 and Windows Phone 7 and WebOS this year), MLB has showed a commitment to delivering content to fans where the fans want to consume it.

“Digital technology is huge for leagues. It allows fans to consume events when they want, how they want and with whom they want,” says Gail Sideman, owner of sports publicity and consulting firm Publiside. Sideman notes that Major League Baseball has done a good job of embracing that concept and offering fans the media they want, where they want it.

“Ultimately fans donâ€™t care how they get baseball, they just want to follow it wherever, whenever and however they can,” says Gould.

Always Innovating

At its core, MLBAM is a technology company, one that, according to Gould, must stay agile to fulfill its mission of delivering baseball to fans. “We must be flexible and ready to capitalize and build on emerging tech developments, ensuring our fans are at the forefront of these interactive media experiences,” says Gould.

It’s that commitment to innovation and willingness to embrace new technologies before they’ve been proven in the marketplace that has kept Major League Baseball a market leader when it comes to digital. In 2005, for example, MLB launched MLBlogs.com, a community blogging site that now hosts over 12,000 blogs. In 2009 they added Twitter streams in MLB.tv. In 2010 the league jumped on the location bandwagon by adding venue checkins to the At Bat mobile apps and in 2011 they livestreamed spring training games via Facebook. Sometimes the experiments don’t work out — the WebOS app that MLBAM launched on August 8 this year isn’t looking like a great use of resources a few weeks later — but more often, MLB’s constant innovation has paid off.

When MLBAM launched their first iPhone app on July 10, 2008 it was hardly a guarantee that paid iPhone apps would be successful (observers will note that July 10 was also the launch of the iOS App Store itself). That gamble was clearly a smart one. At Bat 2011, the current iteration of the app, has been accessed 265 million times this year and has already surpassed 3 million downloads for the seasons (900,000 ahead of last year’s pace).

What’s next for MLBAM? Hard to say, but Gould indicated that the whatever the future holds, the MLB plans to be ready for it. “We continue to envision a trend towards personal, powerful and portable experiences,” says Gould. We just saw the shift where mobile has become the majority of our web traffic, which happened for the first time this July, and mobileâ€™s share only will become more pronounced moving forward.”

Of course, he noted, things change so fast in the world of digital technology, you never really know what’s coming next.

More About: digital media, live streaming, Major League Baseball, MLB, video

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