How We Got Here: Major League Sports And The New Frontier Of Broadcasting

We’re moving into perhaps the most exciting time of the sports year – an amazing March Madness just finished, the NBA and NHL playoffs are getting exciting, and whether you’re a fan of the Big Market Yankees, the World Champion Royals or the small market Oakland Athletics, your baseball team (at least for now) still has a reasonable shot at the pennant. With all of these sports, fans are excited for more … more statistics, more video highlights, and more access to live games.

And the major leagues have largely responded to this streaming demand – after its success in streaming a live NFL tilt last fall, Yahoo is tightening its relationships with the NHL (allowing fans to live stream the “game of the day” up to four times per week) and Major League Baseball (live streaming one game each day throughout the season). Not to be left out, Twitter has secured the rights to live-stream Thursday night football games. This one is particularly interesting as Twitter is better known for being a home for sharing pithy, 140-character comments about a football game than actually watching one—but regardless, it illustrates the competition among online properties to secure sports programming.

Today, with increases in bandwidth and “always on” Internet access on mobile devices, we are in the early days of a new Golden Age of sports broadcasting.

How Did We Get Here?

In the half century between the emergence of television sports broadcasting and the ability to watch a game on your phone, instant access to information was lacking. Let’s go look back to a scenario that could have taken place at the midpoint, in the early 1990s.

Back then, if I moved away to attend college, I had a handful of ways to keep up with my favorite sports franchises:

• During the local news, I could see all the sports results roll by quickly at approximately 11:22 p.m.
• I could wait until the next morning and get a very, very compact box score/recap from one of the wires in my local paper or USA Today—unless I was on the east coast and the game was out west, in which case I’d find out the next day.
• I could visit my campus library to read a week-old version of my hometown paper that arrived via mail.
• I could see if someone had Prodigy or Compuserve and hope they’d let me log in.
• I could call a 1-900 number and get a score – and pay an outlandish fee.
• If I lived I in a major market, I could call the local sports station’s hotline for updates. For example, the nationally syndicated George Michael’s Sports Machine could be reached at 202-362-4444. Why do I still remember this? It’s sports! Of course I remember it.
• On Sunday night after football and the local news I could watch the late Mr. Michael’s “Machine” (if I lived in a city to which it was syndicated) or other similar shows and view select highlights from around the nation.

• And again for football, during the halftime of local market or national games—Giants/Cowboys, Cowboys/Giants, 49ers and somebody, I could get a nanosecond of updates on other games.
• And finally, Monday Night Football would allow us to see some highlights of games from the day before—however, if you enjoyed a less-popular national team (let’s say the 1-15 Patriots of 1991 or myriad pre-Peyton Colts teams) you were most likely out of luck, unless there was a highlight-reel worthy play, or they lost in some cataclysmic fashion that beared viewing.
• Football seemed pretty well covered. If I liked baseball or basketball, it was slightly more challenging—although the Sporting News and sport-specific publications like Hockey Digest and Basketball Digest covered each in-depth, regularly.

And then the sport that changed everything with radio broadcasts in the 1920s did it again: major league baseball.

Beyond radio, MLB has been a pioneer in television broadcasting—from its first televised game (a 1939 matchup between the Dodgers and Reds, just months after the first-ever televised sporting event) to the first nationally-broadcast playoff game (the famous 1951 Giants-Dodgers tilt that ended with Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World”).

Watch a Game on a Pocket-Sized Device? Sure!

Fast forward to the 2010s. MLB began operating what Forbes last year called “the biggest media company you’ve never heard of”: MLB Advanced Media.

While baseball has been known as “America’s Pastime” for more than a century, hockey has largely operated as the fourth-most popular of the “Big 4” professional sports leagues in the United States—even with expansion into nontraditional markets such as Arizona and Nashville. Although the league had some missteps in its early uses of high-tech broadcast gizmos–such as the maligned FoxTrak “glowing puck”—the NHL was an early adopter of implementing solution to reach its fans through streaming video, most recently partnering with MLB Advanced Media, to deliver content through its various online channels.

These are two very different sports—baseball, has history and a huge fan base; and hockey, despite growing support and strong international followings, regularly garners the lowest television ratings of the Big 4 leagues.

Now, beyond the Yahoo and Twitter news discussed earlier, all four sports are using streaming video to reach new fans in new markets, with baseball inking a deal to stream games to China, the NBA furthering international programs that began with late-1980s pre-season tournaments against European national teams, the NHL creating additional opportunities for fans to watch games in nontraditional markets such as Africa and the Middle East, and the NFL continuing its series of regular season games in London (technically called “NFL International”).

So what can each of the leagues do to reach additional fans on new platforms?

1. Offer additional tiered pricing –  make it easy to access games and highlights on an a-la-carte basis rather than requiring the purchase of a full-season package.
2. Embrace the third screen and reduce exclusive partnerships – while the NFL’s “Red Zone” network has been a smashing success, it’s only available to Comcast customers. For a league that set the standard on revenue sharing, why lock into one provider?
3. Encourage teams to have more fun on social media. Some of the most clever Twitter feeds in sports are coming from NHL teams, like the @LAKings, the @TBLightning (and there are similar examples in all four sports). This drives engagement and video views.
4. Leverage fan-created video—include the best Vines or Periscope live video streams as part of the online broadcast, to further fan engagement. (As part of its deal with Twitter, the NFL will share its players’ best Periscope videos prior to games—the next step is integrating the fans’ best into their broadcasts).

Having the ability to watch your favorite sports team from a device that is never more than an arm’s length away is a huge benefit—and a tremendous way to ensure fan engagement. The MLB and NHL set the stage early, and with a spate of recent announcements, all four leagues are following suit—and the additional possibilities are exciting.

This was a guest post, written by Charlie Kraus, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Limelight Networks.