8 ms·

Disney Said to Buy Stake in $3.5B MLB Web Unit

65 points by sswezey 10y ago

mmanfrin 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    ESPN costs tv providers $8 per subscriber per month (might have changed recently though), the cordcutting movement has severely hurt them.
    - colechristensen 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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 10y ago
        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 10y ago
        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.
      - jonlucc 10y ago
        I suppose it would be very expensive to produce decent content for ad-free streaming distribution, because they'd have to fill a whole hour. Take Mythbusters and cut out all the repetition and ads; I bet it ends up around 12 minutes that are expensive to produce. Then you have to make basically 4-5 new shows to fill the rest of that space.
dsugarman 10y ago
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.
- bbatha 10y ago
  And HBO
- tomjakubowski 10y ago
  > it is unbelievable that such a great digital business was created out of a professional sports league. What's so unbelievable about that?
- joshmn 10y ago
  Up until 2016, NHL was with Neulion. NBA is currently with Neulion. NFL is currently with Neulion.
msbarnett 10y ago
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.
- GauntletWizard 10y ago
  Baseball was the sport to do this; Lots of statistics nerds are baseball fans, and they got into computers early on. Seems like the synergy worked out well.
- xirdstl 10y ago
  Only partly forward thinking. They still have all the blackout restrictions, after all.
  - GavinMcG 10y ago
    My feeling is that they're almost certainly being rational on that front. The income from broadcast rights (or network ownership, in the case of the Orioles) is substantial.
    - xirdstl 10y ago
      That may be true. I meant that it isn't forward thinking to require viewers to have a cable subscription to watch, even if it means more revenue in the short term. Even for me as a lifelong baseball fan, I've largely stopped watching games. By the time they do away with the restrictions, will I even bother? Who knows. But I am a little biased and may be overestimating the impact of cord cutting among millennials
      - oldmanjay 10y ago
        If it means more revenue in the short term, and they switch strategies at the point when it no long means more revenue, which they may well do, they are still being forward-thinking. What you are saying is you don't like blackouts and you'd like there to be some reason that MLB is stupid for having them.
theluketaylor 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - colechristensen 10y ago
    I have never had any such issues with HBO Now. Maybe it's more of an ISP peering issue. (That is, if you get Internet access through your cable company, I bet they open the floodgates for HBO Go and not so much for HBO Now)
    - yincrash 10y ago
      Trying to watch Game of Thrones at release time on release night is mostly a nightmare, and I'm glad I didn't try and organize viewing parties because they would have been failures. The HBO NOW subreddit[1] is full of unhappy threads, and at least on one occasion, the error message presented was definitely indicative of an overloaded server[2]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/HBONow/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HBONow/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/HBONow/comments/4ow6eb/anyone_else_getting_a_massively_unresponsive_site/d4g1jcs https://www.reddit.com/r/HBONow/comments/4ow6eb/anyone_else_...
      - tantalor 10y ago
        Yes the server was overloaded, but the service in question was their authentication service, not video streaming. Too many people were trying to login at the same time.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gd2 10y ago
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.
usaphp 10y ago
Those video clips that start automatically playing with sound are annoying as hell, I wish browsers had a way to disable them automatically
- icebraining 10y ago
  Firefox does, but for Flash[1] and for HTML5 video[2]. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/set-adobe-flash-click-play-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/set-adobe-flash-click-p... [2] http://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/11/finally-mozilla-adds-working-html5-video-autoplay-blocking-to-firefox/ http://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/11/finally-mozilla-adds-workin...
megablast 10y ago
So glad to see Disney get involved in everything.
- jaybna 10y ago
  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...
percept 10y ago
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...

65 points by sswezey 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  ESPN costs tv providers $8 per subscriber per month (might have changed recently though), the cordcutting movement has severely hurt them.
  - colechristensen 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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 10y ago
        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.
    - jonlucc 10y ago
      I suppose it would be very expensive to produce decent content for ad-free streaming distribution, because they'd have to fill a whole hour. Take Mythbusters and cut out all the repetition and ads; I bet it ends up around 12 minutes that are expensive to produce. Then you have to make basically 4-5 new shows to fill the rest of that space.

dsugarman 10y ago

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.

bbatha 10y ago
And HBO
tomjakubowski 10y ago
> it is unbelievable that such a great digital business was created out of a professional sports league. What's so unbelievable about that?
joshmn 10y ago
Up until 2016, NHL was with Neulion. NBA is currently with Neulion. NFL is currently with Neulion.

msbarnett 10y ago

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.

GauntletWizard 10y ago
Baseball was the sport to do this; Lots of statistics nerds are baseball fans, and they got into computers early on. Seems like the synergy worked out well.
xirdstl 10y ago
Only partly forward thinking. They still have all the blackout restrictions, after all.
- GavinMcG 10y ago
  My feeling is that they're almost certainly being rational on that front. The income from broadcast rights (or network ownership, in the case of the Orioles) is substantial.
  - xirdstl 10y ago
    That may be true. I meant that it isn't forward thinking to require viewers to have a cable subscription to watch, even if it means more revenue in the short term. Even for me as a lifelong baseball fan, I've largely stopped watching games. By the time they do away with the restrictions, will I even bother? Who knows. But I am a little biased and may be overestimating the impact of cord cutting among millennials
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      If it means more revenue in the short term, and they switch strategies at the point when it no long means more revenue, which they may well do, they are still being forward-thinking. What you are saying is you don't like blackouts and you'd like there to be some reason that MLB is stupid for having them.

theluketaylor 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.
- colechristensen 10y ago
  I have never had any such issues with HBO Now. Maybe it's more of an ISP peering issue. (That is, if you get Internet access through your cable company, I bet they open the floodgates for HBO Go and not so much for HBO Now)
  - yincrash 10y ago
    Trying to watch Game of Thrones at release time on release night is mostly a nightmare, and I'm glad I didn't try and organize viewing parties because they would have been failures. The HBO NOW subreddit[1] is full of unhappy threads, and at least on one occasion, the error message presented was definitely indicative of an overloaded server[2]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/HBONow/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HBONow/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/HBONow/comments/4ow6eb/anyone_else_getting_a_massively_unresponsive_site/d4g1jcs https://www.reddit.com/r/HBONow/comments/4ow6eb/anyone_else_...
    - tantalor 10y ago
      Yes the server was overloaded, but the service in question was their authentication service, not video streaming. Too many people were trying to login at the same time.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

gd2 10y ago

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.

usaphp 10y ago

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

icebraining 10y ago
Firefox does, but for Flash[1] and for HTML5 video[2]. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/set-adobe-flash-click-play-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/set-adobe-flash-click-p... [2] http://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/11/finally-mozilla-adds-working-html5-video-autoplay-blocking-to-firefox/ http://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/11/finally-mozilla-adds-workin...

megablast 10y ago

So glad to see Disney get involved in everything.

jaybna 10y ago
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...

percept 10y ago

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...