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Local news outlets get MLB clips (and money) in deal with video wire NDN

Jeff John Roberts — Tue, 07 May 2013 14:13:52 +0000

Good news, baseball fans: You’ll be seeing more highlights of your favorite team right on your local website’s sports section, as a result of a new partnership between Major League Baseball and NDN, a video wire service backed by Yankees great Reggie Jackson.

The deal, announced on Tuesday, involves MLB delivering customized video bundles to hometown media outlets after a game ends. “If you’re reading a column from Dan Shaughnessy on Boston.com about Dustin Pedroia’s game-winning home run, you can access video highlights right at the story page level,” said Kevin Gentzel, the CRO of NDN.

The partnership could mean some extra revenue for publishers like the NY Post and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The papers, along with radio stations, get the video content for free and earn a cut of the advertising revenue that NDN sells for the videos.

Jackson is involved as a frontman and an investor (other investors include Google’s Eric Schmidt and actor Bill Murray). “I’ve played in the tech world for a long time, be it with Microsoft, Cisco or Google. The tech bug hit me about 15 or 20 years ago,” Jackson told me by phone. “I understand the value of participation and the value of attracting eyeballs.”

For Major League Baseball, which is licensing the clips to NDN for an undisclosed amount, the deal is a way to make money from local highlights without undercutting its core product. According to Kenny Gersh, an SVP at MLB Advanced Media, the league is providing about 30 seconds of game footage along with “ancillary content” such as post-game interviews. Gersh added that the deal also makes sense because many fans prefer to get baseball news through a local beat writer.

The partnership shows the ongoing rise of syndication services like NDN and NewsCred. These companies have found a niche as middlemen, removing the friction of licensing amongst copyright owners, advertisers and publishers.

Reggie Jackson fans: here’s a vintage (non-baseball) clip of Mr. October:

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MLB starts to stream games live on YouTube… outside of the US and Canada

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:27:19 +0000

Major League Baseball is now streaming two games per day live on YouTube, for free – but most of our readers likely won’t be able to tune in: MLB’s live streams will be restricted to users outside of the US, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

However, the league will also add highlight clips from in-season games two days after they air on TV, and those highlights will be available to everyone. Also available on MLB’s revamped YouTube channel: Thousands of archive clips from MLB.com’s “Baseball’s Best Moments.”

Of course, MLB has been streaming in-season games to U.S. viewers who are willing to pay for some time: MLB TV’s premium package currently costs around $130 per year. However, even that likely won’t get you the games you really want to watch: In-market games of your local team are blacked out and only air on TV.

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What I learned at paidContent Live: No one has all the answers on the future of media, and that’s good

Mathew Ingram — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:49:17 +0000

When we started to put together the paidContent Live conference, which we held in New York last week, one of the driving forces behind our selection of speakers was to find those who are doing interesting things — either in new or traditional media — so that we could try and figure out what the future of media is going to look like. As I said during my opening remarks, we may not have all (or any) of the answers, but we do have plenty of interesting questions, and that is a start.

Among those questions are the following: Are people going to pay directly for content? Is native advertising going to subsidize media? Does sponsored content raise ethical issues for media companies? Are individual creators going to succeed by connecting directly with their audiences or by striking deals with existing media entities? And as far as I can tell, the answer to all of these questions is the same: Yes. And no. That may not seem very helpful, but I think it is.

You have to try everything

At one point during the panel on monetization — which also included Richard Tofel from ProPublica, Raju Narisetti from News Corp. and Bob Bowman from Major League Baseball — Atlantic Media president Justin Smith said that his organization didn’t really have a single answer to the question of how to monetize content, because it was more or less trying everything it possibly could (which is one of the reasons why I have said Atlantic is one of the media companies worth watching).

(L to R:) Richard Tofel, President, ProPublica; Justin Smith, President, Atlantic; Raju Narisetti,SVP and Deputy Head of Strategy, News Corp; Bob Bowman President and CEO, MLB Advanced Media paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

For the Atlantic, that means experimenting with sponsored content (despite its potential pitfalls, which were highlighted during the Scientology incident) as well as doing live events, and introducing a premium offering — which Smith wouldn’t provide much detail about but is supposedly coming soon. As he put it:

“To say that the ad model is going to win over the pay model is foolish. I think the solution will be multiple revenue streams, it will be how experimental, how creative you are in seeking out those revenue streams… we must try everything. And we must not believe that one thing is going to work over the other until we actually experience it and see it over a period of time.”

The future isn’t going to be one model

Even just on that panel, we had almost every model represented, with ProPublica — which is built on a donation model, one that Dick Tofel believes will be replicated in dozens of states and cities, in the same way most metropolitan areas have symphonies or ballet troupes — and the Atlantic, and then News Corp. with its variety of hard and soft paywalls, and MLB with its app-based and content-focused strategy. Bowman said everyone should have some form of pay model, because why not give your hardcore fans a way to pay you for what they value?

(L to R:) Andrew Sullivan, Editor, The Dish; Andrew Ross Sorkin, Columnist, NYT; Maria Popova, Writer, Brain Pickings; Tim Ferriss, Author, The 4-Hour Workweek paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

The “blogging superstar” panel also had a variety of models, none of which was obviously better than the other. Maria Popova of Brain Pickings said that she didn’t even think of herself as a business — she wrote “for an audience of one” and was happy to get whatever donations she could get. Andrew Sullivan has famously bet his future on a direct-to-reader model, but he also said he isn’t opposed to advertising either (although he is adamantly opposed to native advertising). And Andrew Ross Sorkin says he is happy to continue building a personal empire of sorts within the New York Times.

Maybe that in itself is enough of a valuable insight, at least for now: that the future of media isn’t going to be one thing, or even a couple of obvious things — there is no one-size-fits-all solution (if there ever was) and waiting around for one to appear is a mug’s game. At least for the foreseeable future, the landscape of digital media is going to be a form of loosely organized chaos, with everyone trying whatever they can. As Clay Shirky said about newspapers two years ago, this chaotic environment is actually beneficial, because we need to try everything in order to figure out what works.

Note: You can find streaming videos of each of the major sessions at paidContent Live in this post, and links to transcripts of those sessions in this post, as well as a roundup of our live-blogging of the event.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Mark Strozier and Albert Chau

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MLB plans ad exchanges to target premium baseball fans

Jeff John Roberts — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:43:59 +0000

Major League Baseball will start collecting more data about customers who visit its websites as part of a plan to create new premium categories for online advertisers and increase revenue from MLB’s media properties.

MLB is also planning online ad exchanges in which brands can bid in real time to show ads to a specialty audience — say affluent female car buyers — on sites they own such as the New York Yankees team page. According to a Thursday press release:

“Advertisers now can identify affluent audiences based on a range of demographic, behavioral and purchasing attributes and target them across all MLB properties.” The ad initiative reflects MLB’s role as the most tech-savvy sports league; to learn more, come see MLB Advanced Media CEO Bob Bowman join us at paidContent Live on April 17.

The release was put out by BlueKai, a company that collects and analyzes data from consumers as they move across different websites. In a phone interview, BlueKai Director of Business Development, Gina Kim, said the company is providing MLB with a data platform but that the league will not use it sell customer information to other publishers.

MLB’s plans to create more granular advertising segments also reflect a broader trend across major websites. Facebook, for instance, announced this week that it’s now using third party data companies to offer super-specific audience segments like “children’s cereals” or “full-size sedan buyers.”

The BlueKai executive said the data deal for now just covers desktop browsers and not mobile devices.

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Commutist podcast: Patent trolls, Costco ban and Passbook’s home run

Chris Albrecht — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 07:01:25 +0000

We kick off today’s show with patent trolls: scourge of the tech world, or are they just misunderstood? (Hint: they are not misunderstood.) Jeff John Roberts tells us about the troubles with patent trolls and what we can do about them. Want to know how to get banned from Costco? Derrick Harris says you just need to buy tons of hard drives, like the guys from BackBlaze did. And finally, Apple’s Passbook was a big hit with Major League Baseball fans, but how will smartphones impact America’s pastime? Tom Krazit brings it all home (you’re going to buy more stuff).

SHOW NOTES:

0:00:00 – 0:11:00 – Patent Trollin‘ with Jeff Roberts

0:11:00 – 0:12:00 – This episode is sponsored by the GigaOM RoadMap conference

0:12:00 – 0:22:00 – Backblaze gets banned from Costco

0:22:00 – 0:33:00 – Take me out to the ballgame… with Apple’s Passbook

0:33:00 – 0:36:00 – Parting gifts:

Tom recommends the MLB’s At Bat app

Erica likes Trover for previewing her travels

And for those with kids, Chris recommends the book “Goodnight iPad“

PREVIOUS EPISODES:
Commutist, meet Nerdist, and interview with Chris Hardwick

T-Metro, Broadband Caps, Remembering Steve Jobs

Apple’s iO-Mess, Dirty Data Centers and Tesla

News from the Mobilize Conference

Paul Tough: How Children Succeed and what you can learn from them

The iPhone 5 Event

Come on, Kindle, Light My 4G Fire

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Why I’m not voting for David Freese to be a 2012 All-Star

Staci D. Kramer — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 13:00:24 +0000

The heat is on for St. Louis Cardinals fans to vote 2011 World Series MVP David Freese into the 2012 All-Star Game. The Cardinals even have a get-out-the vote campaign going with the Chicago White Sox: Cards fans rooting for Freese are urged to use their American League votes for Jake Peavy, and vice versa rather than any of the other candidates to be the fan pick for the last one added to each roster.

Fans have 98 hours from the time the nominees are announced to vote — and 25 votes each through browser ballot or by SMS text messaging. More than 50 million votes were cast last year, according to MLB. (More details below.)

Easy enough. Then I looked at the online ballot and took a virtual step back from providing my email and birth date plus zip code. It had two checked-off boxes, requiring me to opt out of getting messages from sponsor Firestone and from MLB.

Yes, I know I could lie, go with 1/1/19XX or the like. Forms like this double-dog dare you to. I could use a throwaway email address, a different zip code. On the surface, all MLB wants to know is that a person did the voting, not a script — each vote requires a captcha — and that I’m 13 or older.

But what MLB really wants in exchange for our vote or votes is access to us and our OK to share that access with others. (Granted, MLBAM already has access to me personally through subscriptions and other signups but Firestone doesn’t.) Each time someone votes, the ballot remembers the info you put in the first time — and forgets the opt out, filling in the permission boxes again. Most of the non-paranoid people I know would use their email address. I’m taking a course in statistics from Udacity but I’m not far enough along to do the odds for how likely someone filling out the ballot more than once or twice, let alone all 25 times, is to forget to unpick the boxes at least once.

MLB is looking for one more thing — video subscribers. Voters with a valid email address who don’t already get MLB.TV or MLB.TV Premium will be offered a 14-day free trial. Current subs will get a 15 percent coupon for the MLB.com store.

As for texting, available to U.S. and Canadian fans, I thought about the amount of spam or “commercial” text messages I’m already getting. I thought about my colleague Jeff Roberts’ pangs after he swapped Google his mobile number for the price of a latte.

How much is too much?

I may have been more sensitive to this because of an incident Tuesday at a Starbucks community table when the nice contractor who made space for us started to pay for something over the phone with his credit card. Our eyes met and I told him it was fine if he made the transaction at the table but maybe it would be better for him if he didn’t. He went outside to finish the call, came back and thanked me for reminding him that a place where you feel secure isn’t always a secure place. It reminded me, too.

That idea carried over when I opened the browser to vote, melding with a concern that’s been growing over how much information I share and who with.

I trust the fine folks at Major League Baseball and its Advanced Media arm. The privacy policy is clearly marked and as easy to read as these things get. But it’s time to stop handing over even minimal info without thinking about it.

If you still want to vote 25 times for your favorite player, make sure the form is right each time. If you want to text a donation make sure you aren’t saying yes to more inbound texts unless you’re OK with getting them from that source and that you’re not okaying third-party access unless you want it. Make sure when you have to start over with a form that boxes you checked or unchecked stay that way; far too many default even when some of the info come back. If you want coupons sent to your phone, check the fine print or be ready to pay a different price.

How the Final Vote works

Freese and Peavy are among the 9 candidates for the “Final Vote”: a gimmick introduced in 2002 that lets fans, who already select the starters by position, pick the last player added to each league’s roster. (There were ten but Atlanta Braves vet Chipper Jones was pulled out midway to substitute for Matt Kemp on the National League team.) The winners get a ticket to Kansas City for the 83rd All-Star Game May 10th, plus cash in cases where a bonus for making the team is in their contract. (There’s an uproar right now, complete with conspiracy theories, over just that.)

The five nominees for each league are picked by the respective managers of last season’s World Series opponents, “in conjunction” with Major League Baseball using “Player” rosters compiled by players, managers and coaches from each team. Tony LaRussa, who retired as Cardinals manager at the end of the 2011 season and now works for MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, gets to manage the National League team; Rangers Manager Ron Washington has the American League. The sponsor gets naming rights for the vote; last year it was Sprint, this year it’s the “Final Vote Sponsored by Firestone.”

Voting ends Thursday at 4 p.m. ET.

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Where to watch the 2011 Home Run Derby online

Ryan Lawler — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 19:44:10 +0000

The 2011 Major League Baseball All-Star Break is upon us, and one of the week’s premiere events will be streamed live online for the first time. For baseball fans, it doesn’t get much better than watching sluggers battle it out to see who can knock the most balls out of the park, which is why Monday’s live stream of the Home Run Derby should be one of the most popular events this year.

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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How the TV Industry Can Make Up Lost Revenue Dollars

Michael Wolf — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 22:00:11 +0000

Total subscription dollars for video go down in an OTT world. And while every household in the U.S. cutting the cord is an unlikely scenario, the increased popularity of services like Netflix on Demand and Hulu Plus is real. How, then, does the world of video entertainment and pay-TV make up the lost revenue?

Vid-Biz: CBS, Comcast-NBC, Hulu

Ryan Lawler — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:15:24 +0000

CBS: We’ll Cut iTunes Prices for Some Shows; CEO Les Moonves says the broadcaster will mark down the price on some of its shows from $1.99 to 99 cents. (MediaMemo) Moonves also boasted about the importance of retransmission fees and growth at the company’s cable channels. (paidContent)

Roberts, Zucker To Appear Before House Judiciary Committee; the House Judiciary Committee will hold a Feb. 25 hearing in which Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and NBC Universal president Jeff Zucker will discuss their proposed $30 billion joint venture. (Multichannel News)

Will You Pay for Hulu on the iPad? It May Be Your Only Choice; the most likely scenario for Hulu to appear on the iPad is one where access to its videos comes as part of a subscription package. (MediaMemo)

The People Of Twitter Think NBC’s Olympics Coverage Sucks; NBC is driving people on the Internet crazy by tape-delaying coverage of the Olympics until primetime, with roughly two thirds of tweets about the NBC Olympics coming up as negative. (TechCrunch)

Sports Leagues Monetizing Video Content Online; led by the trailblazing efforts of Major League Baseball, other top US sports leagues have made huge strides in streaming live-game content on a paid basis. (eMarketer)

2010 Looks Brighter for Digital Media; online video continues to capitalize on the continued increase in media fragmentation, consumer-generated content, and a rising generation of consumers very comfortable using their computers as primary or secondary entertainment devices. (MarketingVox)

Vid-Biz: MLB, Felicia Day, Teen Sex Show

Chris Albrecht — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:08:55 +0000

Major League Baseball Nabs Geo-location Patent; system will tell if MLB.TV users are in areas where games need to be blacked out. (Silicon Alley Insider)

Felicia Day on Questions You Should Ask Before Starting a Web Series; new media mogul suggests figuring out how your project is unique to the web and yourself, as well as identifying who your audience is and if you know what you are getting into. (Felicia Day)

Comedy Central Signs Midwest Teen Sex Show; cable network developing the straight-talking, risque show about sex education. (Tilzy.tv)

CBS CFO Talks Hulu; says that his network’s content would only appear on the Hulu on a non-exclusive basis. (paidContent)

Dailymotion and Hayden Black Team up for Cabonauts; web series described as a sci-fi musical comedy. (MediaWeek)

Lawyer Sees “First Amendment Perfect Storm” on the Horizon; Matthew Leibowitz wrote to the FCC to warn that newspapers declining mixed with potential bank/government control of TV stations could negatively impact free speech. (Multichannel News)

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