If you follow sports at all, you can’t have missed the news recently about pitcher Mark Buehrle’s perfect game for the White Sox – a remarkable feat that’s only been done 18 times in all of big league baseball’s 170,000-plus games). But while Buehrle and the Sox didn’t miss a beat in their 5-0 victory over Tampa Bay, Major League Baseball has been missing all of the most critical beats when it comes to building and maintaining their brand online, in an age when many people already find baseball irrelevant.
News of Buehrle’s accomplishment spread like wildfire, igniting the White Sox (who struggle with a tepid fanbase) and fans everywhere. In this day and age, that means something else, specifically: a fan sliced and diced the game tape up and made a quick montage of all 27 outs, and posted it to YouTube. But before you could click “favorite”, the video had been taken down.
This is not the video you're looking for...
Sure, you can still find about a zillion videos of the game on YouTube – but most of them are shot from handicams or cell phones deep in the stands, hardly exciting or even easy to follow. Captures of the actual broadcast were pulled down in a jiffy, and Major League Baseball (or more specifically, MLB Advanced Media, their new media arm) is missing an opportunity.
“Any rebroadcast, reproduction, or other use of the pictures and accounts of this game without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is prohibited.” If you’ve ever spent many lazy afternoons with the game on TV, you’ve probably got that phrase pretty much committed to memory, right next to the peanuts and Cracker Jacks. But when what you’re talking about isn’t a pirated rebroadcast of the entire game, but rather a fan-edited tribute reel, how dumb do you have to be to yank it? The fans are all you have, MLB, and this is a perfect example of a situation where you should be letting them run wild, let word spread and build up interest. Instead, you’re shooting yourself in the foot, and while game attendance is up, TV viewership continues to decline.
World Series TV ratings - copyright TVbytheNumbers.com, used without permission
Understandably, MLB wants to protect its own online video fountainhead, MLB.tv, from cannibalization. However, instead of seeing these short clip shows as competition, they should instead be viewing them as free advertising for MLB.tv’s many other excellent features, full season catalog, trackers, and more – features which YouTube can’t and won’t cannibalize, and which many fans are probably unaware of. But as the viewership trend indicates, the audience is growing more and more fragmented and niche-based, which means that not everyone is going to want to subscribe to MLB.tv. They’re going to want to find the clips on their own terms. Frustrating them isn’t going to get them to pay the $34.95 subscription fee, and I don’t have reliable numbers on MLB.tv subscriptions but I’d be willing to bet they’d be making more money on micro-revenue from these non-customers by simply hosting their own YouTube channel with advertising. After all, it’s not hard to make more money than $0.
However, I doubt that MLB is going to shift its perspective on this sort of thing anytime soon. So while I’ll continue to root, root, root for the Cubbies (against my better judgment), the hardliner politics of MLB management – the kind responsible for the 1994 strike, which nearly killed my enthusiasm for the sport entirely – does not encourage me to be a fan, but rather puts obstacles in my way. If they don’t make some changes soon, they may find themselves becoming even more irrelevant in the media landscape of tomorrow. (As a first step, maybe they could redesign the MLB.tv front page so it doesn’t look like a porn site.)
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8 Responses:
August 12th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
If you compare MLB against the other sports, baseball is well ahead in developing (and monetizing) the online video market. MLB.tv has no counterpart in the NFL, because of that sport’s exclusive deal with DirectTV that seriously limits my ability to watch my out-of-market team. MLB.tv and their other web efforts have also helped the sport capitalize on rapidly growing international interest in the sport.
The fall off in those World Series numbers has more to do with the lack of compelling matchups than any failure to properly harness the potential of YouTube. Note the huge spike in 2004 when the Boston Red Sox broke their 86 year long drought. Not only has ballpark attendance been rising (although there was a slight dip in ‘08 after a record-setting year in ‘07) but revenues have grown steadily in the past few years and could soon pass those of the NFL.
Now I’m not saying there aren’t things that MLB Advanced Media could be doing better, and a redesign of the website would be a good place to start, but they’ve also been out in front on several areas which have contributed to their financial success in recent years in spite of any slippage in traditional TV viewership.
August 13th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Strong. I mostly agree, although I (who am far more critical of baseball than most I know) wonder how much of an impact a viral campaign or internet outlet would have on an old-world, tired sport. Definitely, a strategy of “something is better than nothing” can’t hurt, but MLB’s problems stem largely from the product itself not being made for TV in an era where everything needs to be in order to succeed. It’s impossible for television to recreate the feeling of attending a game in person, as anyone living in an MLB city knows, and that’s the issue. Declining TV numbers certainly reflect that we live in an era where your average sports fan and consumer are spoiled for choice — a definite change from when baseball was king. And when presented with a buffet of options, people (casual fans, in this case) tend to go with the simplest choice. It’s no wonder, then, why the NFL leap-frogged baseball as the national past time 15 years ago (It’s by far the easiest sport for a casual fan to track, thanks to it’s relatively short schedule. It airs on the laziest day of the week. And, even though the construct of the game itself bitterly looooong to play out, it is made for TV). To that end, you’re right that MLB should feel a mandate to branch out to the 21st Century fan in some way or another because they cannot do it with product alone. You’ve got big problems, as a League, if no one cares about the World Series when the damn Red Sox or Yankees aren’t involved. So if MLB.tv starts it’s own “channel” on YouTube, a la CBS or any other number of media entities, maybe that’ll put a dent into the problem. But casual fans only have so many dollars to vote with, which is problematic not just for baseball, but for most of entertainment.
August 13th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
I have the benefit (?) of not really following the NFL, and certainly not the NHL, so I can’t say with any confidence what those sports are doing in comparison to baseball. But I can say that Alan indirectly hits on the larger point I’m making: baseball has had a lot of trouble keeping up as we’ve moved to a television society. That huge spike in 2004 was a historic event, and doesn’t change the overall trendline, which is solidly down.
Now, we’re moving away being a television society, as well. So if you can’t even compete with other interests in a TV society, how can you expect to compete with the infinitude of choices in games and on the web? Whether or not casual fans have enough dollars is not really the issue - it’s that everybody has the same number of hours in the day.
So is MLB going to bother to remind me that baseball exists, or aren’t they? YouTube is free advertising, from that perspective. When I search for a game and find nothing but handheld shots two hundred feet back in the stands, where I can barely read the numbers on the jerseys, I don’t exactly feel like baseball is dynamic or exciting.
August 15th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
The sad thing is, baseball will probably never reach a level where people view it as “dynamic.” That’s partially the fault of the string-pullers at the top, but also because — as has been discussed — it now becomes imperative for baseball (or any brand) to cater to their base and firm that up before branching out. It certainly is about dollars. There are three types of fans: 1) die-hards, 2) casuals who have a favorite team, 3) the guy who tunes in watch Boston in 2004. Aggressively marketing to fan #3 would appear futile, as they’re only interested in the mega-event and, frankly, there aren’t many mega-events any sport. And from a night-in night out p.o.v., watching, for example, Kobe Bryant or LeBron James dunk a basketball is, visually, far more enticing than seeing A-Rod’s four plate appearances. They’re more conducive to highlights, which is the real fan get-’em.
August 15th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
You can watch MLB games with live video on your iPhone with MLB.TV (and of course on a computer). MLB has new media down. They want people going to their sites to see it.
Even with MLB Lite (free) for the iPhone you can watch video clips from the perfect game.
I agree that they would be smart to let people use clips… it’s almost certainly fair use, but let’s be real, I don’t think this is what makes baseball unpopular. I think the 3-second attention span of the MIchael Bay era is more responsible.
August 17th, 2009 at 9:47 am
I agree that baseball isn’t exactly tailor-made for today (although personally, considering how “always-on” everything else in life is, I find great value in going to a game now and then and just shutting off).
However, my whole point is that baseball could be making significantly better efforts to acknowledge and embrace the situation, rather than fighting it. I don’t agree that “MLB has new media down”. They may have some cool tech (one of these days I guess I’ll just have to get an iPhone), but I think they’re showing fundamental misunderstanding of the landscape.
August 17th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
This is interesting, and related: the SEC is revising its new media policy to restrict what fans can and can’t do at games (mostly what they can’t do). Namely, no Facebooking, Twittering, or otherwise live-updating in any way what is going on.
http://mashable.com/2009/08/17/sec-new-media-policy/
I see this as a similarly hopeless attempt at containment that will only end up as pie in their face. Of course, they could always install cell-phone jammers in the stadium – I can’t see anyone getting upset about THAT.
August 17th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
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Then I’m curious what your standards are. Because, as I said, I think MLB is way ahead of other sports in monetizing online media. And they’ve got the steadily increasing revenues to show for it. If people ARE paying for it…why let it out there for free? Or why give people fewer reasons to visit your site?