Mr. Protalinski: the regular season began on March 31.
Since major league baseball has significant revenue streams from national networks, team networks, and now apps for mobile devices, free viewing of regular season games will not be happening for a long, long time. There is also a hierarchy of blackout situations (where fans cannot watch their team) and this is more likely to be relaxed than paid viewing. Even still, an advertiser would expect a reduction in ad rates if viewership were diluted.
Pre-season on Facebook? It's a free sample and not a harbinger of the foreseeable future.
After experimenting with high-profile video content on Facebook, Major League Baseball (MLB) has decided not to continue offering free streams during the regular season. Bob Bowman, CEO of MLB.com, told All Things Digital that while the trial was successful, it wasn’t popular enough to warrant being extended for future games:
Last month you started streaming spring training games, for free, on Facebook. Did that generate any new business for you, and will you keep doing it?
As a conversion tool, it was de minimus. But that didn’t bother us, because we were using it as a promotional vehicle, to get people excited about baseball. And to see how many people would take time out and watch it. We had tens of thousands each day doing it. [But] we’re not going to do the embeddable player for the regular season. What we found was during the past few weeks, as many people clicked the link (back to the MLB.com site) as clicked the embeddable player. One might think that the embeddable player would get a lot more clicks. But a lot of people are so used to seeing video on a full screen, with full features, that they ended up back here.
Starting last month, baseball fans were able to watch a spring training game live on MLB’s Facebook Page for free (Facebook Credits not required). One game will still be broadcast live on the social network each day through the end of spring training in April, but then it’s all over.
This is unfortunate, because as we’re already pointed out, a live sports game has a bigger potential on Facebook than any other type of video content (movies, TV episodes, and so on), simply because users are more likely to share a live event with real-time status updates.
Hopefully other sports leagues won’t shy away from giving Facebook a shot in the near future. Which sport would you be interested in watching live on Facebook, for free?
