MLB's Digital Dominance | Mauricio Alejo 
Baseball's Most Valuable Player: MLB Advanced Media CEO Bob Bowman at his Manhattan cubicle farm cum TV studio. | Photograph by Kevin Cooley For decades, the prevailing wisdom has been that professional baseball is behind the times. Its ownership rejects new voices like Mark Cuban. The game doesn't have the electric action of, say, curling. Like newspapers in a digital age, baseball is a relic that can't distract the kids from Facebook and Wii, no matter how many players pump human growth hormone.
And yet, step inside the offices of MLB Advanced Media, the digital arm of Major League Baseball, and the first thing you notice is not a beaming photo of 74-year-old commissioner Bud Selig, or black-and-whites of Joe DiMaggio. Next to a row of cubicles full of people writing code sits what appears to be a complete television studio, in which, on this day, former player Billy Sample is discussing baseball's hot stove league with an eager young interviewer named Casey Stern. The program is "Bottom Line," and it is streamed live across the planet on BaseballChannel.tv, a 24-hour video news outlet on MLB.com. It's the middle of January, the season won't start for months, but here, in a lofty space in a former biscuit factory on the west side of Manhattan, people are busy slinging out more live Internet video than any other Web site on earth -- 12,000-plus events last year -- and getting customers to pay for it, handsomely.
Take a moment to think about that: As TV and computer screens converge, and mobile devices demand ever more rich content, media companies have been in a furious dash to better monetize video online. (They had a rather nasty spat about it in Hollywood this winter; you might have noticed while watching Dance War: Bruno vs. Carrie Ann for the fifth time.) Meanwhile, MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) has turned online video into such a cash cow that it's a major reason why analysts believe baseball is about to pass the NFL in total revenue. In 2007, Major League Baseball is expected to haul in around $5.8 billion, just short of the NFL's $6.3 billion. Its biggest growth engine is MLBAM, which last year brought in $450 million (up from $236 million in 2005). Continuing at its current pace, MLB should catch up with the NFL around 2010. "The growth has exceeded our wildest expectations," says MLB president Bob DuPuy. "No one in the game believed that the Internet would be as pervasive a commercial vehicle for us in such a short amount of time."
How did this happen? Credit Bob Bowman, MLBAM's president and CEO. When the 52-year-old was hired by Selig and DuPuy back in November 2000, he had never worked a day in the world of pro sports. A former president of ITT, he also founded howtoguru.com, a "sports instructional site," and served as CEO of consumer technology retailer Outpost.com. MLB, at the time, was equally inexperienced in digital media. Just months before Bowman was hired, the URL mlb.com directed you to a Philadelphia law firm. Yet Selig and DuPuy recognized that relying solely on the old broadcast model was leaving money on the table. The league generates so much content -- 2,500 games a season -- that no one TV network (or three) could possibly broadcast it all; fans were being underserved.
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Comments | 4
April 17, 2008 at 10:56pm
Brian RossMr. Leitch's homage to BAM, above, seems to ignore the darker side of MLB's media arm and the bigger question: Is there a First Amendment right to free speech in the coverage of sports or entertainment. As BAM dominates baseball in the electronic space, what value, to MLB, is there to that pesky local and national media that have a tendency to write stories of which MLB does not approve, on players not meeting ideal standards or, oh, testing positive for substances that alter the game.
You won't see any hard-hitting steroids stories in the MLB network.
BAM gets information minutes to hours before MLB releases it to anyone other than the "rights holders," large old-line media companies like ESPN and FOX willing to pay big dollars for the right to cover these clubs. There was a point in time, two years ago, when the venerable Sporting News was kept out of a locker room of one of the major league clubs during the spring until the rights holders had their time with the team.
Rights holders have an incentive to get first blush on the news, but the flip-side of that is the high level of censorship that it affords MLB. While they would never come out and outright violate "free speech" by telling any of th rights holders what they can and cannot run, because BAM controls a lot of the content origination, and access to things like photos and video clips, there are ways of arm-twisting and channeling the information flow to minimize disruption or diversion of MLB's message to sports fans.
Of bigger concern in MLB's operation of BAM, is what happens when the local newspapers and media outlets finally migrate over to the web? MLB will really not need them. Unless they pay, of course, and play ball.
While running a sports news system is not unique to MLB, they have escalated the command and control features of their product to Orwellean levels that are not seen in the other major league sports.
When the medium becomes the messenger of its own message, you have the same kind of journalism practiced in totalitarian and communist countries: The official line.
BAM is not an additional content provider. It is a content-control system. FastCompany's cheerleading aside, its role in the control of the news flow should be seen for what it is.
April 4, 2008 at 5:35pm
James Bellei'd think that drilling a hole in the bat makes it lighter thereby affecting the swing!
April 2, 2008 at 11:42am
Kevin JordanApril 2, 2008 at 11:42am
Kevin JordanComment