The league has offered mobile apps for several years and has continued to attract new app users each season by experimenting with pricing structures, adding new features and most importantly, giving fans ways to access its live and archived content on a phone or tablet. The audience has historically been made up of mostly iOS users, who account for 70 percent of the free At Bat app downloads and 85 percent of the paid app downloads. But MLB’s Advanced Media office, which develops those apps, says Android use has been growing recently.

Baseball’s mobile app audience is interesting because it’s not like the TV watching audience — MLB apps are not just used by fans who aren’t at a game. MLB has deftly built its online and mobile viewing audience by understanding that and embracing the ubiquity of mobile devices. MLB Advanced Media CEO Bob Bowman — who will be speaking at paidContent Live 2013 this month in New York City — told me recently that for younger fans, the smartphone “is the first screen, not second screen” and that any app the league makes “has to have everything” if they want to engage and keep those fans around for years.

Today MLB apps can be used as a mobile baseball ticket, and to check in, get coupons for merchandise, order food and even upgrade your seat during the game with MLB mobile apps — and, of course, to watch or listen to games when you’re not near a TV.

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• Major League Baseball is pretty pleased with the fan response to making a couple of ballparks’ tickets compatible with Apple’s Passbook: the past two weeks, 12 percent or 1,500 fans chose to use Passbook. Marketwatch says it could be the beginning of the end for paper baseball tickets.
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• Apple is growing its share of junior high and high school customers: 40 percent of teenagers have an iPhone. Meanwhile,  just under half of those surveyed own a tablet, and of those, 72 percent say it’s an iPad, according to a recent Piper Jaffray survey. (via AppleInsider)

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That game was watched by 30,000 baseball fans across the globe. Those 30,000 fans have turned into millions of fans across the world and that little experiment is now a mega-million dollar business. Since its launch, the service has broadcast 1.5 billion live video streams and has accumulated a total of 3.7 million subscribers.

Today in order to succeed, services need to go beyond the web. And ubiquity means being on multiple devices.  Like, Netflix, MLB.tv, got that right very early in the game. MLB Advanced Media is one of the more progressive online services as it has evolved with the times, adapting to viewing behavior of its customers. When broadband speeds increased, MLB.tv increased its online video quality. When tablets became popular, it created apps for the iPad and later for Android devices including the Kindle Fire.

As popularity of Roku and Apple TV grew, they made apps for those platforms as well. It is on XBox live and is slowly making its away to all sorts of connected devices. For 2012, MLB.tv is streaming 1.1 million live video streams per day. So far in 2012, MLB.tv has seen 27.3 million mobile live video streams. In the first week of 2012 baseball season, MLB saw 3 million downloads of its At Bat 2012 iPad app. At present there isn’t a professional sports league that holds a candle to MLB’s online arm.

From a personal perspective, during the baseball season, I don’t think I can last a single day without MLB.tv. Being a participant in a fantasy baseball league, I use the service and its advanced features to keep an eye on some of my players. (I am second to last this season, but can’t blame the streaming service for my picks and their injuries.) I can safely say, had it not been for MLB.tv, I wouldn’t have been an early (perhaps earliest) cord cutter. I hope these guys keep making baseball more fun in years to come.

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These particular COWs and COLTs are being positioned around Detroit and Kansas City to flood their baseball stadiums with LTE capacity just as the Major League Baseball season peaks. It’s a sign Verizon’s new LTE network isn’t quite so new anymore. Verizon has now sold enough 4G smartphones, and those smartphones have begun consuming enough bandwidth that the carriers’ original high-capacity 4G network doesn’t have the juice to hold its own at crowded events.

I’m not saying Verizon’s LTE network is overcrowded. It’s using 20 MHz of spectrum to support 8 million LTE connections across the country. Its network has plenty of capacity to spare. But stadiums are special cases, packing tens of thousands of people into cramped spaces, many of whom are uploading videos and photos.

Concerts and sporting events will always push the limits of the mobile network, but what’s telling here is that Verizon is already deploying 4G COWs and COLTs at these events. It means its 4G network is already being tested: Current users are consuming more bandwidth than the handful of towers around these stadiums can pump out.

It’s at these stadiums where we’ll first witness the evolution of Verizon’s and other carriers’ networks. The COWs and COLTs will remain, but they will eventually be augmented with Wi-Fi and new network architectures designed to pack tremendous amounts of data capacity into confined spaces. Verizon has already started down that path by building distributed antennas systems (DAS) into stadiums. New LTE DAS systems just went live in Chicago’s Wrigley Field and in Miami’s Marlins Park.

DAS setups take the capacity of a single cell and distribute it among numerous antennas, allowing a carrier to shape cellular coverage within or around buildings rather than just blast bandwidth out from up on high. Those DAS systems, however, will eventually give way to Verizon’s first small cells. Instead of distributing a single base station’s capacity among numerous antennae, a picocell or a microcell will deliver the entire base station’s bandwidth at a single location.

Then those small cells will move outside to the stadium’s outdoor seating areas and its environs, transmitting directly underneath the macro network umbrella. At that stage, all of those disparate technologies will coagulate into the amorphous mass of the heterogeneous network. At any given location our devices will have multiple options in connecting to the network, and hopefully bandwidth won’t be such a limited — or expensive — commodity.

Mobile networks are evolving, and if you want to see that evolution firsthand, you should start going to more baseball games.

Verizon cow image courtesy of Flickr user turtlemom4bacon

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MLB told the New York Times the results of the last-minute push will be used to assess how social media like Twitter might be used in 2013. The contest to select the last player in the roster for the National League and the American League started in 2002, and unlike the fan vote for the starting lineup that includes paper ballots, has been digital-only all along. More than 50 million votes were cast online or by text in 2011 (each fan gets to vote up to 25 times); including Twitter should push the needle this year.

This year’s vote for the final players to be selected for each team already included a heavy emphasis on Twitter by MLB and the teams campaigning to get their players selected. The contest is known as #FinalVote. Players have hashtags like #freeseplease for the St. Louis Cardinal’s David Freese, #takejake for Chicago White Sox pitcher Jake Peavy or #BryceIn12 for Washington Nationals rookie Bryce Harper. MLB.com carefully includes hashtags in posts meant to play up the contest, the players and the 83rd All-Star Game July 10th in Kansas City. The players campaign too, for themselves and each other.

I wrote Wednesday about how privacy concerns kept me from voting online or from giving up my mobile number via text. Voting by Twitter removes that friction. My Twitter handle (@sdkstl) is already public and linked with my name. If I choose to link that in turn with voting for players or any other poll going around, the impact is minimal. It may get others who felt the same to participate.

So is the league’s ability to verify or monitor who is taking part, undermining the idea that birthdates are needed either to make sure the 13-and-under set isn’t voting or to verify votes. It will be able to collect handles used in the contest but it’s not like getting permission for sponsors to send promos.

Does a tweet equal an online ballot that requires at least one mlb.com visit, where you see messages from sponsors, and engagement, even if the info provided is false in an unknown number of instances? Or an SMS message someone may have to pay to send? Not at first blush. But if it gets more people vested in the outcome or interested in the game, that could be a different story.

Update: The 98-hour contest ended with a barrage of tweets at 4 p.m. EDT Thursday and a total of 50 million votes across Twitter, browser and SMS message. Freese led in overall votes with 8.4 million, while Texas Rangers rookie Yu Darvish won the American League slot with 7.3 million. The Cardinals beat the Rangers in the 2011 World Series (Freese was MVP) and the managers for that series lead the All-Star teams.

Votes for only nine of the 10 players nominated were included in the total from MLB; Chipper Jones was leading the National League when he was pulled off the ballot to join the team as a substitute. Including his votes would have pushed the total well over last year’s 50 million-plus. Instead, it took the last-minute Twitter push to stay even with 2011.

The contest drew more than 600,000 tweets during the four hours, averaging more than 2,500 a minute and peaking at 8,881 at 3:59 p.m. It scored on awareness too, with the leaders trending in the U.S. and all the players trending in their markets.

More than 391.2 million votes were cast on 34.9 million online ballots (both records,says MLB) when fans chose the 17 starters, announced last week.

Will any of that carry over the game on Fox Tuesday night? Or the hoopla surrounding it? Or did the activity come from people who would watch anyway? The only thing certain from this vantage point is it gave MLB and MLB.com a chance to break through the clutter and add some momentum going into the break.

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Analytics already have a home in baseball

As much as many of us hate to admit, sports is a business, which is why many teams operate under a “what have you done for me lately?” mantra when it comes to re-signing, trading and cutting players. Next week at IBM’s very own Information On Demand conference, for example, Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt plays him in Moneyball) will discuss how he changed the game by analyzing somewhat-obscure data to determine which players represented the best cost-benefit ratio. That’s the type of analysis that any businessperson can get behind: Is this guy worth the money, or is there someone else who gives me more bang for the buck?

But in most sports, business is not all about winning and losing; it’s also about pleasing the fans that keep ticket and merchandising revenue coming in. In a recession that isn’t easing, one might argue that keeping cash-strapped fans happy is more important than ever. Sometimes that might mean keeping a fan favorite even if it means paying him more than his recent statistics suggest he’s worth (see, e.g., Derek Jeter). Sometimes that might mean not overpaying for someone who the fans never wanted in the first place (pick your favorite outlandish contract).

Don’t my feelings matter?

A few years ago, my beloved Green Bay Packers had a chance to sign all-star wide receiver Randy Moss for a song. Assuming the fans wouldn’t welcome the move (Moss did pretend to moon Packer fans a year earlier), they didn’t sign him. The results were (arguably) the failure to win a Super Bowl, even though the Packers got close, and a very public falling out with Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre, who had wanted the team to be more aggressive in bringing in new talent.

Had social sentiment analysis been the talk of the town then, and had I suspected someone was listening, I couldn’t have tweeted hard enough to express my feelings: Sign Randy Moss! I might have been in the minority, but knowing the decision was based on hard evidence at least would have soothed the blow.

Enter the “T” score

Already, IBM’s research indicates some interesting trends that one World Series team, the St. Louis Cardinals, might take into account. Jonathan Taplin of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab (IBM’s partner on this project and some similar ones) highlighted the following in a blog post:

So far the students have mined an initial test of more 1.5 million public baseball-related tweets during the National League Championship Series (NLCS), gauging positive and negative nuances and establishing overall sentiment rankings among a sampling of NLCS players. They determined that the Cardinals’ Chris Carpenter garnered the highest number of tweets indicating sentiment at 1,573 — 61.4 percent positive and 21.6 percent negative. While fellow Cardinal David Freese, a fan favorite and official NLCS MVP of the pennant race, garnered fewer tweets than Carpenter (768 tweets total), he had a more uniformly positive twitter following — a ‘T’ score of 89.3 percent positive tweets compared with only 15.4 percent negative.

As the project expands over the course of the World Series, these trends will likely change somewhat and others will emerge. Done over the course of a season or two, the analysis of fans’ feelings about particular players could be telling, especially if analyzed against seemingly disparate data such as merchandise sales or attendance. Winning is great, but if slightly less production from one player means slightly more revenue from fans happy to come watch him play, or if paying big bucks to bring in a controversial player will likely cause fan backlash, it might be worth listening to what the fans have to say.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ewan and donabel

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The contest begins at 8:00 p.m. EDT/5:00 p.m. PDT this evening, when Jose Bautista, Robinson Cano, Prince Fielder, Adrian Gonzalez, Matt Holliday, Matt Kemp, David Ortiz and Rickie Weeks will give their best hacks at Arizona’s Chase Field. The Derby will be broadcast live on ESPN, with commentator Chris Berman calling all the action. But for those without cable, have no fear: The contest will also be streamed online and possibly even to your Xbox 360.

The Home Run Derby will be streaming live from MLB’s Facebook page for the first time ever, as the baseball league attempts to tap social media to attract more interest in the already-popular event. In addition to the live stream on Facebook, a number of players will be live tweeting during the event, including David Ortiz (@davidortiz), Jose Bautista (@JoeyBats19), Matt Kemp (@TheRealMattKemp), Heath Bell (@HeathBell21), Gio Gonzalez (@GioGonzalez47), Hunter Pence (@HunterPence9), Brandon Phillips (@DatDudeBP), Gaby Sanchez (@GabySanchez215), Justin Upton (@RealJustinUpton), C.J. Wilson (@str8edgeracer), Howie Kendrick (@HKendrick47) and Joel Hanrahan (@hanrahan4457).

Those with an Xbox 360 game console may also be able to tune into the live stream as well, as the Home Run Derby will also be available on streaming service ESPN3. While not accessible through all ISPs (you can check to see if the service is available to your broadband provider here), ESPN3 can be watched through the Xbox Live service, and usually provides pretty good quality streaming video to the big screen.

For those on the go, the Derby will be available through the league’s MLB At Bat apps for Android  and iOS devices . Streams will also be on the WatchESPN app — but that’s currently only available for Time Warner Cable, Verizon FiOS and Brighthouse Networks subscribers.

Photo courtesy of (CC BY 2.0) Flickr user SD Dirk.

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Live game video streaming is usually only available if, in addition to purchasing the app, you also have MLB.TV subscription access (which you can also now access on your Apple TV, by the way). For April, Volvo is sponsoring a free trial of live streaming for all MLB.com app owners (iPad and iPhone versions). It’s sure to be a hit with those who’ve yet to decide whether or not they want to sign up for a full MLB.TV subscription, but it might also alienate some who decided to take the plunge early and pay full price ahead of this feature introduction.

The app also introduces a completely redesigned Gameday feature, which displays pitch-by-pitch live info on a virtual version of the actual at-bat live for users without live video access. The updated Gameday now features ballpark renderings from MLB 11: The Show, a PlayStation baseball simulation video game.

Finally, users of the apps will also be able to view key plays and occasional live clips, black-out games included, and watch past 2011 season games on-demand in the archive after they air. iPhone users will also be able to access new At the Ballpark features, including check-ins, maps of stadiums, special deals and social media features.

Android users won’t get the month-long free preview or access to archived games, but instead will get one free live out-of-market game every day for the duration of the season, and all the other new features mentioned above that are coming to the iPhone version.

I plan to spend April hooking up my iPad 2 to the TV using HD mirroring to watch baseball, something I haven’t done regularly since I was very young. This is definitely a smart move from an organization looking to attract new viewers, though I find it surprising that the iOS apps are still distinct, and not a single, universal version. We’ll see if it translates into higher subscription numbers once the trial is over.

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Ferrell is no stranger to sports, having made comedy spoofs Talledega Nights, Semi Pro and Blades of Glory, but this was his first time pitching in a live game. Ferrell — or rather Johnson — had an ignominious minor league debut, getting tossed out of the game after bringing a bag of beer to the mound and throwing his first pitch behind the batter.

Ferrell is no pro, but he’s not the only celeb who has had trouble finding the plate. In his first attempt at making the ceremonial first pitch at a Dodgers game last year, TV funnyman Adam Carolla tried three times to throw a strike before giving up, as Jimmy Kimmel reported.

But at least Carolla eventually got the ball over the plate (kind of). Meanwhile, Mariah Carey, in a promotional appearance in Japan, threw a pitch that bounced a few times and rolled to the catcher in the dirt around home plate.

Of course, no collection of memorable pitches would be complete without this demonstration of the ruthlessness of Randy Johnson’s fastball. In the video below, Johnson shows the celebs how it’s done, by beaning a seagull with his 95 mile an hour heater.