As your resident sports industry insider, I´ll be focusing each of my class blog posts on how digital platforms and internet channels have affected both athletic competition and the fan experience. This week I shine the spotlight on Major League Baseball, which was one of the earliest world professional sports leagues to embrace advanced digital media and its potential. This 2011 article from noted tech blog Mashable extols the virtues of MLB´s successful decade-long odyssey to bring baseball games from Yankee Stadium to your tablets and smartphones:
http://mashable.com/2011/08/26/mlb-digital-media/
Nowadays in 2012, sports enthusiasts take for granted their ability to obtain real-time access to streaming video of their favorite team´s games. In 2002, however, this capability was no easy feat to pull off, even for the most tech-savvy digital programmers and marketers. As an early adopter with a broad vision, MLB took a leap of faith in investing heavy financial resources to bring this technology to fruition, and as a result they now enjoy a very lucrative secondary source of channel distribution for their product. Sports fans agree that baseball is the ideal sport to watch on a computer, as the natural gaps between game action (i.e. between pitches, between at-bats, between innings) fit well with the digital consumer´s propensity to multitask. MLB has capitalized on this natural fit by offering a reliable video product that can be scaled to fit any screen size a user makes available for game viewing.
MLB´s wildly successful approaches to digital marketing and digital product delivery over the past decade have been unapologetically copied by other professional sports leagues around the world, to the benefit of fans of all sports all across the globe. Additionally, streaming video technology has seen relentless improvement and innovation from year to year. Major League Baseball deserves credit for driving this accelerated development, as it has proven with its sophisticated advanced media products that niche consumers are willing to pay high premiums for digital access to live sporting events.
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