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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG

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

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure
• Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for Enterprises
• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies

At Bat is available on iOS, Android and for Blackberry 10 devices. There are different price points — from free to $19.99 to a full live TV package for mobile and desktop that costs $130 a season. Unless users are watching a live game — which can stretch to over 3 hours — he said users spend about 10 to 12 minutes per day in the app.

But for all that time fans spent in the apps, Bowman — who will be appearing at our paidContent Live event tomorrow – said he wasn’t sure about monopolizing his customers’ time while on mobile devices. When asked at the Dive into Mobile conference Tuesday whether he could foresee an MLB-branded homescreen play like what Facebook is doing with Home, he sounded skeptical.

“I don’t know the answer to that. We’re always one for trying to experiment,” he said. “And we don’t mind failing.” But baseball needs to balance being available and not overwhelming its fans and users of its apps, he added.

“Ours is valuable content and we know people love baseball,” Bowman said. “But you’ve got to respect people’s time. To say we want to own every piece of every day, we’re hardpressed to say that. We like to be the hotel after a long trip.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• Podcast: Mobile winners and losers in 2012 and what to expect in 2013

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• Podcast: Mobile winners and losers in 2012 and what to expect in 2013

The app was built with the help of a company called Experience, and it uses fans’ personal preferences to offer them seats they might like better based on the real-time inventory of tickets available. For MLB, the effort is designed as another way to let fans “personalize their ballpark experiences.”

With the new “upgrade seat” button in the app, teams can offer better or simply different seats based on a particular fan’s preferences. Those preferences are culled from information the fan has already shared with MLB — either through ticket purchases, check-ins at the game within the app, etc. So if, for example, you bought four tickets in the outfield, the app can offer you four tickets closer to home plate. Teams might also use the seat-upgrade function to entice fans to special seating sections — areas with access to specific food options or more exclusive sponsored areas. The pricing is determined by the team, and they can choose to offer the upgrades for discounts during the game.

The first teams to offer this service at their stadiums will be the Arizona Diamondbacks, Atlanta Braves, Minnesota Twins and the Oakland A’s. The service will go live in April.

The At the Ballpark app debuted before the 2012 season as a way for fans to check in to stadiums to receive offers like discounted food and drinks and team apparel, as well as buy tickets, order food and share on social media. The ticket upgrade feature is just one of the ways MLB is using mobile tech to reach fans. The 2013 season, which begins March 31, will also see 13 MLB teams using Apple’s Passbook feature for iPhone as a way to accept mobile tickets on game days.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

To get the 2013 version of the app, iOS users simply have to download the update in the App Store — no need to download a whole new app. Returning Android users will have a choice depending on the app they have installed. If you had the app called At Bat, you just need to look for the update; if you had the At Bat ’12 app, you’ll have to look for a new app to download. (I’ll update this story with the direct link as soon as the app goes live.)

The app is free, but to unlock access to live games for the 2013 season and World Series, it requires a one-time in-app purchase $19.99 subscription fee — or iOS users can pay in month installments of $2.99. However, as with last year’s version, subscribers to the league’s MLB.TV subscription plan for watching games online can get At Bat 13 for free.

Last year’s online and mobile video bundling deal resulted in downloads of the 2012 season app hitting 7 million, which surpassed the downloads during the 2010 and 2011 seasons combined.

This year, At Bat is again offering some cost-saving deals for subscribers that should juice downloads. Previously, fans had to pay separately for access to the mobile app as well as live game audio through the MLB.TV desktop website, but At Bat 13 subscribers will now get GameDay Audio (MLB.TV’s most popular feature) for free. And for subscribers who may own both iOS and Android devices: one subscription works on any platform now; you no longer have to pay for access on each.

Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media — whose CEO, Bob Bowman, will be speaking at our paidContent Live event in April – runs all of the league’s digital properties. And MLBAM made big strides this year in incorporating more news video and its historical video content into its mobile apps. Game highlight video will now be embedded in news stories in the app. More than 70 classic archived games dating back to the 1952 World Series will also be accessible, and the whole of MLB’s video highlights are finally searchable — it previously went back to just 2008. Stats are also playing a bigger part of the user experience: tablet users will now have access to sortable batting, pitching and fielding statistics.

Though it’s not yet ready, a version of At Bat for Blackberry 10 will arrive by Opening Day, I’m told.

This story was updated at 9:04 a.m. PT with a link to the iOS app.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
• When video gets democratized, who wins and who loses?
• Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shines

MLB.TV warns subscribers from the start that some games are blacked out, including nationally televised Fox and ESPN games; Tuesday night’s game in Kansas City is one of them. Based on tweets about MLB.TV, it looks like a lot of people skip the fine print or assume the All-Star Game is an exception.

Damn it, MLB TV. I just want to watch the All Star game at home. That is why I bought MLB TV. But nooo, you have to black it out. Grrrr..

— Dan_Rowinski (@Dan_Rowinski) July 11, 2012

It’s only a video blackout. The audio is being streamed on MLB Gameday Radio, a subscription product that runs $20 for the season and post-season. Stats are online and on mobile. (I haven’t seen any unauthorized feeds yet but if this is like any other event, if there’s a will, there’s a way until rightsholder whac-a-mole takes them out.)

It’s not an issue for me. This sports geek household planned dinner at home with the ASG in mind. But the black-out window is a reminder that even though NBC Sports plans to stream thousands of hours live from the Olympics in a few weeks and even though tens of thousands of hours of sports are streamed live now, we are nowhere near a time when all televised sports are available across platforms.

And that’s not likely to happen until the leagues, the programmers, the distributors and advertisers find a way to make cross-platform viewing as valuable as broadcast or cable. Even when events are streamed, most require authentication through a pay TV subscription — as is the case with the Olympics and Wimbledon — or a subscription fee for a package like Tour de France Live.

In some cases, even paying for TV isn’t enough. As a Charter household, we can watch broadband network ESPN3 on computers but not streaming linear networks ESPN and ESPN2 because Charter lacks a WatchESPN app deal. That’s one reason sports fans are among the least likely to cut the cord all the way.

At least this game, unlike those only on cable networks, is available to anyone who can get the Fox signal.

Also, Screw you @MLB. You’re VERY lucky that I’m paying for cable TV cause tonight’s game is blacked out on MLB.TV mlb.mlb.com/mediacenter/in…

— Adam Jackson (@adamjackson) July 10, 2012

Another reason this blackout stands out: the 83rd All-Star Game may be the most digital ever in many respects. Major League Baseball and its teams have been hyping social media, especially Twitter (#ASG), like crazy. Fans who want to play All-Star Bingo can earn cards by sharing them with friends with a trip to the World Series as the grand prize and free days of MLB.TV for runners up. Everything — from last week’s intense Final Vote contest to All-Star Bingo and more — was designed with one goal in mind: sending fans to their TVs and keeping them tuned in throughout the game, even if takes other screens to do it.

Here’s Derek Jeter himself answering YOUR questions in the Social Media room: #ASG #AL twitter.com/MLB/status/222…

— MLB (@MLB) July 11, 2012

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Where the next-generation console fits in today’s video game market
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room

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

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• How the TV Industry Can Make Up Lost Revenue Dollars
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management