
Disney Said to Buy Stake in $3.5B MLB Web Unit - sswezey
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-30/disney-said-to-buy-stake-in-mlb-s-video-arm-in-3-5-billion-deal
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msbarnett
MLBAM has turned out to be a brilliantly prescient partnership by MLB club
owners.

Most of the time you wouldn't accuse the average MLB club owner of being
particularly forward thinking, but in 2000 it wasn't obvious that creating an
in-house online media company was going to pay off hugely in the long run.

~~~
xirdstl
Only partly forward thinking. They still have all the blackout restrictions,
after all.

~~~
ubernostrum
MLB reached a settlement earlier this year in an antitrust suit over the
blackout restrictions. It's not perfect, but did help a bit. Price increases
of MLB.tv subscriptions are capped until 2020, they had to introduce a no-
geographic-blackout option for subscribing to a single team's games (though
when the game would have been blacked out by regional market, you have to have
a cable subscription which offers the local broadcast in order to dodge the
blackout), and they had to commit to either getting agreements to allow in-
market streaming of games Comcast, Fox and Root regional affiliates' areas or
else be unable to raise subscription prices at all until 2020.

You're still stuck with the fact that any game ESPN picks up is blacked out
nationwide, though.

~~~
jc4p
> you have to have a cable subscription which offers the local broadcast

I watch all NFL local broadcast games over a cheap digital OTA. Can the same
thing be done here for people without cable?

~~~
brewdad
With only a handful of exceptions (ie the Los Angeles Dodgers show about 10
games a year on an OTA station), every team has exclusive deals with cable tv
stations for local broadcasts. Even Fox has taken to putting many of their
weekend national broadcasts on FS1, a cable channel. ESPN also has a Sunday
night game on cable only.

So the short answer is: no.

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theluketaylor
mlb advanced media has quietly become a media giant. Not only do they run the
fantastic mlb.tv service, they handle streaming for other leagues like nhl and
pga. They also stream for channels, including hbo and espn.

~~~
yincrash
Just HBO NOW, not HBO GO. HBO NOW has been really disappointing. Their service
cannot handle the load when popular episodes get released, and often the
quality of streaming is much lower than what could be supported by end users'
connections.

~~~
lotso
Why is HBO Now and HBO GO run on different services? Really curious about
this.

~~~
gabbo
Hard to say for sure, but since HBO Go is tightly coupled to cable companies -
I would guess its distribution model is as well.

I can imagine a cable operator centric replication model for Go, where HBO
doesn't handle customer delivery at all. Instead their library would be
replicated from HBO to {Comcast, Cox, TimeWarner, ...}. Each HBO Go customer
ID would be assigned a "master cable operator" responsible for their delivery
and managed centrally, but HBO would feed customers links to operator-local
content replicas.

In the common case, customers access HBO Go from within the operator's network
so transit is free and HBO is totally out of the data path (just catalog/user
interaction/etc.). But the service can still easily support remote access by
going over the public internet.

The benefit of that model is HBO controls the catalog and most of the user
interaction, but doesn't need to build/provision/pay for a CDN which scales
with # of total HBO subscribers across the entire world (and guarantee
reliable connectivity from their CDN to every customer). They just need to
replicate their library across a few tens of cable operators who are able to
keep everything local. Plus the entire sales/marketing/billing models are
completely different too.

Thinking about it from HBO's perspective it makes a million kinds of sense if
you have the majority of your customers paying for you via the broadcast cable
subscription model. OTOH, with HBO Now there is no cable operator in the
picture so they can't make that optimization and now have to build something
which looks more like Netflix.

~~~
zerohp
HBO Go doesn't stream from the operator that you sign in with, it streams from
nearest node. I am temporarily living in a place with Time Warner cable but I
sign in to HBO Go with an Xfinity account. The stream comes from Time Warner.
However, if I watch through xfinity.com, it comes from Comcast (and the
bitrate is much lower).

~~~
gabbo
Interesting - I guess that actually does make sense, thanks for the pointer.

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percept
I can see why, as everything seems to be going the way of the content mill
these days. Much like the direction Yahoo followed, I consider it a "People
Magazine" effect.

Both ESPN's site and MLB's own have pushed the sport into the background, and
oftentimes the cover pages don't even discuss game results, but rather stories
of some personal angle, or whatever is most inflammatory: this guy punched
that one, that guy's making a million dollars a year long after his retirement
(despite the team getting the benefit of what is essentially a payment plan),
etc. Make 'em laugh or make 'em mad.

The players are dressing up in costumes, or even posing naked for magazines
(at least a couple of times now). The game becomes more of a vehicle, a means
to a different end. Eyeballs and advertising. Of course that's why all that
money's there to begin with...

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gd2
I'm a fan of the MLB app. While Bloomberg stressed video streaming, for me,
MLB app shines in that space where I want to know what's happening in real
time, and be able to see well chosen hi-lights, but don't want the time
commitment of watching the video of a whole game.

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dsugarman
it is unbelievable that such a great digital business was created out of a
professional sports league. MLBAM isn't just MLB, it licenses to all major
sports leagues.

~~~
tomjakubowski
> it is unbelievable that such a great digital business was created out of a
> professional sports league.

What's so unbelievable about that?

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mmanfrin
Pretty obvious move. Disney has been hurt hard by the switch away from cable
(despite the massive profits they're making with Pixar, Marvel, and Star
Wars). Buying MLB helps shore up their positions on sports, which have been
eroding away under ESPN.

~~~
coderdude
They have a one-third stake in Hulu so it probably doesn't matter what medium
wins. I'm sure they'll be there.

~~~
mmanfrin
ESPN costs tv providers $8 per subscriber per month (might have changed
recently though), the cordcutting movement has _severely_ hurt them.

~~~
colechristensen
How do they get away with selling commercials when they charge that much?

I recently tried sling.tv and it was terrible. Why would I want to pay to
spend 1/3 of the time watching ads? (not to mention how _bad_ almost all of
the programming is)

I would pay a _lot_ for a content subscription that had a history channel that
actually had history programming... a science channel that actually had
science programming ... all without ads or gimmicks.

Mythbusters guys are great but half the content is either commercials or
cliffhangers trying to get you to stay past the commercials.

There is a vast untapped market of educated people who want to purchase
content that's targeted beyond the means of a clever 8th grader. Instead we
get news for gossip freaks, reality tv shows, and what little advanced
interesting content there is is targeted way too young.

~~~
coderdude
Science and history programming is sadly low brow. Netflix had a 12 part
series of lectures from Neil deGrasse Tyson that were refreshingly thorough
and weren't watered down. They didn't seem to have it licensed for very long
as I think it's already removed from their library.

Regarding stuff that seems to be geared towards 8th graders, that's just what
some people want to see and you couldn't force them to watch anything with
more substance if you wanted to. Not everyone has to enjoy the finer things. I
don't think it's that they don't know there's a difference. It's just boring
as all hell to most people.

~~~
wj
If you are referring to Cosmos I just double-checked and it is still on there.
I only watched the first four episodes so I would have been really
disappointed if they had already been removed.

I think a lot of people like the parent assume that there are large amounts of
people like themselves that would pay for a dedicated of niche content. I
really don't think that is true. As every indie filmmaker and SaaS
entrepreneur knows: the number if people that say they would pay is a
magnitude more that the people that actually do.

A lot of industry observers are speculating that a la carte cable would be the
doom of a large portion of the smaller niche channels that are bundled by the
content companies (like Discovery Networks) with their more popular channels
when they sell them to the cable companies.

~~~
coderdude
It was actually named something bland like "Neil deGrasse Tyson Lectures." I
doubt that was the exact name but something along those lines. Definitely
wasn't Cosmos, though.

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usaphp
Those video clips that start automatically playing with sound are annoying as
hell, I wish browsers had a way to disable them automatically

~~~
icebraining
Firefox does, but for Flash[1] and for HTML5 video[2].

[1] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/set-adobe-flash-
click-p...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/set-adobe-flash-click-play-
firefox)

[2] [http://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/11/finally-mozilla-adds-
workin...](http://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/11/finally-mozilla-adds-working-
html5-video-autoplay-blocking-to-firefox/)

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megablast
So glad to see Disney get involved in everything.

~~~
jaybna
Disney owns ESPN. Notice this was done by Disney and NOT ESPN. This is another
shot across the bow of other sports networks given how much BAM already
controls of digital rights - and cord cutting is rolling along...

