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As MLB.TV approached its 20th anniversary last Friday, Gregg Klayman remembered a line from a 2002 article about the league’s then-embryonic streaming service.“The best quote was something like, ‘No one is ever going to watch live baseball on their computer,’” said Klayman, MLB senior vice president of product and content strategy, who in 2002 had his hands on various elements of the new service as the league’s manager of fantasy and interactive games. “We had to kind of laugh through the negative press and know that it was probably going to be bumpy for a little bit.”
Twenty years after MLB became the first professional sports league to livestream a regular-season game, MLB.TV’s steady ascent continues. This season, it’s on pace for 11 billion minutes watched by September, after reaching 10 billion minutes for the first time over the course of last season. MLB also has buoyed the streaming industry at large with its influence and direct impact in helping power other platforms over the past two decades.
A hurdle that continues to cap its streaming potential, however, is the blackout policy, which forbids the livestreaming of in-market broadcasts. MLB has a territorial rights system to determine what qualifies as in-market around the country; all of Iowa, for example, is within the blackout region of six different clubs: the Brewers, Cardinals, Cubs, Royals, Twins and White Sox.
League officials wouldn’t delve into specifics regarding how or when they see the policy either ending or being relaxed, but MLB Chief Revenue Officer Noah Garden offered a nugget about what could be looming on the horizon: “I would say there’s going to be more to come on that front. … I hope at one point to have in-market [streaming] available on the product as well.”
With blackout clauses included in existing deals that the league has with its broadcast partners, Kenny Gersh, MLB’s executive vice president of business development, emphasized the complexity in finding a solution.
“It’s like a Rubik’s Cube, where you change one dynamic and it has four other ripple effects. But we are laser focused on that topic and are trying to see how we can navigate the rights landscape to ensure that anybody around the globe who wants to watch a Major League Baseball game has a seamless-as-possible way to do so.”
Blackout issues aside, MLB.TV has largely succeeded in that mission —which prompts some nostalgia from league executives.
“When we launched this thing, it was a global disaster,” said Garden, who served as MLB Advanced Media’s senior vice president of e-commerce during MLB.TV’s earliest stages. “I remember the buffering. I remember the crashing.”
Early investment in Major League Baseball Advanced Media (or BAM), which oversaw MLB.TV, included $120 million gathered from the 30 clubs — $1 million from each club over four years beginning in 2000.
About 30,000 fans tuned in to watch the online stream of the New York Yankees’ 10-3 win over the Texas Rangers in the Bronx on Aug. 26, 2002, which came three years before the launch of YouTube and five years before Netflix began streaming. The video player had a resolution of 320 by 240 pixels — the lowest possible resolution. “And if you went any larger, it looked like a pixelated mosaic,” Klayman said. “It was awful.”
The next year, MLB streamed the entire season, gathering 100,000 subscribers — at a price point of $79.95 for a full-season package — in the process. From there, the milestones began piling up.
MLB was the first league to wire its venues for TV-quality streaming (2005); the first to stream live 720p HD video (2009); the first to stream live games and a subscription product to the iPhone (2009); the first live video on connected devices (2009, Roku); the first to stream live games and a subscription product to the iPad (2010); and the first to stream live video to a gaming console (2010, PlayStation 3), among many other achievements.
Along the way, MLB didn’t shy from helping others get their streaming products off the ground. Gersh was an executive at CBS Digital working directly with BAM to stream March Madness in 2006 before joining MLB that August. BAM’s thinking at the time and in the years ahead followed a well-worn maxim: A rising tide lifts all boats.
“If a fan went to stream March Madness on CBS and it was a poor-quality experience, they were going to be less likely to buy MLB.TV,” Gersh said. “It could have been totally unrelated things, but people would think, ‘Well, streaming sports isn’t ready, I’m not going to pay X dollars for this.’ So by sort of becoming the backbone of livestreaming on the internet, it was to help MLB.TV and led to all of these other things.”
BAM did similar business by providing white-label solutions for ESPN, WWE and HBO, among others, which led in 2015 to the creation of BAM Tech, a separate media company that was eventually acquired by Disney in 2017.
“The proudest thing for me and my career when I look at all the streaming services that are out there now,” Gersh said, “is how many of them we were involved in launching.”
All told, MLB.TV has a lot to celebrate. It marked the occasion on Aug. 26 with fireworks animations on its homepage.
“Who knows what the next 20 years will bring,” Garden said. “But looking back at the last 20, it’s been a whirlwind and fun ride.”
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