MLB President of Business & Media Bob Bowman at Re/Code's Code/Media conference Thursday said MLBAM is going to take its non-baseball content and "separate it from the baseball business." Bowman: "It deserves to be separated. The risk profile may be different in that business than in a baseball business with our owners, and so we've been talking to potential equity investors ... and it's going really well" (RECODE.net, 2/18). THE STREET's Ronald Grover noted the aim would be to "create a sports streaming service that would enter the market" for providing OTT sports to subscribers, "making it a potential competitor" to ESPN. MLBAM "provides streaming services" to MLB teams, as well as the PGA Tour and CBS' March Madness coverage. Bowman said that MLBAM "wants to raise funds or create partnerships to help it separately operate the outside streaming business as an over-the-top venture capable of bidding for popular sports events." Bowman said, "There's a role for an over-the-top program service and we think we can compete." He added that the "non-baseball streaming business generates" roughly 30% of MLBAM's overall revenue.Meanwhile, Bowman said that MLBAM is "not likely to bid on the package of Thursday night football games currently being offered" by the NFL, largely because the technology "doesn't exist to offer what he said were 10 million concurrent video streams at one time without degrading the viewer experience" (THESTREET.com, 2/18).
NO THURSDAYS: Asked if a streaming service like Apple or Google would be awarded rights to something like "Thursday Night Football," Bowman said, "No. To do 10 million concurrent streams in the U.S.? No one's done them. The most we've ever done in terms of concurrency is we've kissed 2 million concurrents, and that's for some of our partners, not for baseball." Bowman: "Could Google or Amazon do something like this? Sure. Could they bid for the NFL rights? Sure. Is it worth doing -- whatever the price is -- for 10 weeks? Don't know. Is that a business model or a stunt? Don't know" (RECODE.net, 2/18).
SUPER STREAM: BROADCASTING & CABLE's Chris Tribbey noted while CBS execs certainly "savored the outcome" of the net's Super Bowl live stream, it "didn’t come without a lot of headaches on the front end." CBS Sports Digital Senior VP & GM Jeff Gerttula said, "The biggest challenge was building a stream for as many different platforms as we did, and it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, where you can do it once for different devices. We actually had to invest time and development and testing into each platform independently. All of the devices we streamed on required incremental, independent work, and it was a challenge to focus on as many platforms as we did, develop for it, (do quality assurance), test it, prepare for scale, and let it rip." He added that if there was "one thing that surprised CBS" it was how many people "accessed the live stream on over-the-top devices." He also noted that the live stream on average was "about 30 seconds behind the broadcast, depending on the platform and device" (BROADCASTINGCABLE.com, 2/15).
