The New Media Ball Game
Over the past week, baseball fans in all markets thrilled to Interleague matchups that are designed to bring teams together that would only play each other in the World Series under normal circumstances. It exposes up-and-coming players to a larger audience, and gives the fans more action to follow throughout the season. Earlier this year, it looked like Interleague series might be the only way a lot of fans could see their favorite teams, especially if they play in a different media market.
Just as Spring Training was drawing to a close in March, the nation’s cable operators, the office of the Commissioner of Baseball, and even Congress were all involved in a bitter standoff over which carriers could broadcast out-of-market games. In a nutshell, MLB would only allow operators to carry baseball’s complete games package, Extra Innings, if they agreed to deliver the year-round MLB Channel (a long-delayed project that could be described as a glimmer in Bud Selig’s eye, at best) to all of their subscribers.
To the dismay of many fans, DirecTV agreed to a 7-year, $700 million deal that would give them exclusive rights to Extra Innings, so any fans that follow an out-of-market team would be forced to get a dish and subscribe. At the 11th hour, MLB went back to negotiations, and finally struck a deal with all the major cable providers. While I understand the league’s need to maintain the value of its property, the fans that they fought so hard to win back after the 1994 players’ strike might get fed up if squabbles over TV rights become the norm.
One factor that went surprisingly under the radar during the whole affair is the relative shelf life of the product – in this case, region-free live sports broadcasts. With a host of exciting new distribution technologies on the horizon, Major League Baseball and other content providers would be wise to pull down the walls surrounding their content, and concentrate on driving revenue by advertising to a much larger audience.
Affordable, novel hardware like the Slingbox and Apple’s iTV makes moving online content across multiple devices a snap. Convenient living room access to a world of entertainment, sports and news broadcasts means content disputes, like the one baseball fans got mired in, will go the way of the dodo.
It doesn’t end with hardware, either. The rapidly-evolving IPTV space will deliver an unprecedented amount of content to a global audience – so the national pastime can find new fans in South Korea, while viewers in South Dakota can check out this “cricket” they’ve heard so much about. Smarter ad models that match out-of-market program with local advertising, and incorporating sharper demographics targeting, will ensure that programming remains valuable in its appeal to a broader, global audience.
When content is free of bonds like subscriber-only access and territorial lockout, everybody wins. Play ball!