Major League Baseball Strikes Out on Facebook
(SPORTS TECHNOLOGY)
On the heels of the news of Crackle, which lets you stream Seinfeld, other TV shows and movies for free on your iPad, Major League Baseball has decided to end their free live streams on Facebook (News - Alert), according to Business Insider.
“MLB (News - Alert) was providing a live game feed to select spring training games that could be watched directly via the MLB Facebook page,” BI wrote, adding that “this was a pretty big step for the league, which generally maintains very tight control over all of their digital content.” Besides generating a bit of buzz for spring training games, it showed MLB might be dipping a toe in the 21st century.
Business 2 Community wrote that “when given a choice fans will prefer to watch live sports online on a social platform (Facebook) over of a non-social platform (MLB.TV).”
But Bob Bowman (News - Alert) from MLB Advanced Media said it was “not a great conversion tool for generating MLB.tv subscribers,” BI said. So RIP, Facebooked RBIs.
Hey, MLB? It was SPRING TRAINING. Only the most diehard baseball fans care about spring training, and they’re all 89 years old and not on Facebook anyway. If you’d waited until the regular season, Red Sox-Yankees, you’d be rolling in your conversions.
And trying to pimp MLB.TV isn’t a good reason to stream live baseball over Facebook anyway, given MLB.TV’s much-hated blackout policy: “Facebook user Beau Boedecker commented, Unfortunately, it’s absolutely worthless because of the blackouts. Fix that and I’m in’,” according to Business 2 Community.
“If a company is going to provide a brand new way to consume content, they need to provide enough time for the corresponding consumer behavior to change,” BI observed, probably correctly. For years MLB.com is the only place baseball fans can go to get live games, they’re not going to all change their habits overnight.
Sheesh, baseball, give it a chance. As Jackie Cohen writes on AllFacebook, “MLB needs to stream an in-season game on Facebook. It doesn’t even have to be free of charge, but it should at least cost less than a typical game stream on their site — perhaps Facebook Credits could be used to pay for the video, much like how Warner Brothers has embraced this digital currency for streaming movies on the social network.”
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Juliana Kenny
