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
"The site has to work for the 90-year-old and the 9-year-old," says Bowman, so variety and adaptability are key. "They didn't cheapen out on the experience," says Jupiter Research analyst Bobby Tulsiani. "If you're going to make people pay, you have to give them something they can't get on TV.
"You could even argue that with sports, watching online is a better experience."
Users seem to agree. In a typical day during the season, as many as 11 million people visit the site. Three million watch video. The average user watches for an unheard-of 37 minutes per viewing -- only one minute less than the average time spent watching baseball on TV. The league, in a way, is becoming its own broadcast partner, even sending announcing crews to games not covered by ESPN or local stations. It's not hard to imagine how that could jeopardize lucrative TV contracts one day, but for now, says Tulsiani, "it's additional, not cannibalistic."
Meanwhile, MLBAM has such a lead on other leagues that it has taken to hiring out bandwidth and expertise to other outfits, from the U.S. Figure Skating Association (for which it hosts video) to Major League Soccer (whose entire Web operation it runs). Last year's NCAA Basketball Tournament, hosted by MLB.com, drew 17 million viewers. And that number is expected to grow this year.
Bowman admits to a personal motivation. Part of Selig's original vision was that the Internet could do for baseball what national TV rights did for the NFL -- Pete Rozelle's famous notion of parity through profit sharing. For Bowman, a die-hard fan of the long-suffering Milwaukee Brewers, that's particularly sweet: "Seeing them become more competitive might be the most satisfying part of this."
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Recent Comments | 12 Total
April 2, 2008 at 7:42am by Kevin Jordan
April 4, 2008 at 1:35pm by James Belle
i'd think that drilling a hole in the bat makes it lighter thereby affecting the swing!
April 17, 2008 at 6:56pm by Brian Ross
Mr. 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.