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New deal for HBO OTT service will mean growth for MLBAM

MLB Advanced Media began 2014 with major video streaming deals with Sony and World Wrestling Entertainment, representing huge boosts to its non-baseball business. Its new pact with HBO to power the cable network’s forthcoming over-the-top streaming service ends the year in much the same fashion.

The new deal, disclosed last week, calls for MLB’s digital arm to provide the technical infrastructure to a stand-alone digital video service, as yet unnamed, tentatively slated to debut in April concurrently with the return of the wildly popular series “Game of Thrones.” The HBO contract adds to a fast-growing collection of MLBAM streaming clients that also includes ESPN, Glenn Beck, Turner Sports and 120 Sports.

MLBAM executives declined to comment on the HBO deal. But winning the account for the planned HBO OTT network, one of the most watched developments in the media industry, represents another significant coup for baseball, and will result in staffing and infrastructure upgrades at MLBAM.

About 50 of MLBAM’s 750 employees now work exclusively on outside, non-baseball business, and it recently opened an office in San Francisco designed in part to service Sony’s forthcoming PlayStation Vue video service. The employee headcount will soon grow with the arrival of the HBO work, which will be handled in both New York and San Francisco.

Helping lead the HBO project for MLBAM will be Joe Inzerillo, executive vice president and chief technology officer; Kenny Gersh, senior vice president of business development; and Martin Keely, senior vice president of partner solutions.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but the deal is thought to immediately vault HBO up among baseball’s largest outside clients.

HBO’s decision to work with MLBAM arrived after many months of planning to support its OTT service in-house. But as the planned launch date has neared, HBO instead elected to shut its project down and lean on MLBAM’s decade-plus of experience in digital video that now helps it stream video for more than 30,000 events annually, representing 400,000 hours of live content. Only a small fraction of that total is baseball games.

MLBAM could see additional streaming deals next year, because nearly every major content programmer is pursuing an OTT initiative of some sort.

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