MLBAM Postseason Deal Solidifies Key Premise in Digital

MLBAM announced a deal with Turner and Fox to offer a postseason version of its popular live streaming video package. I’ve read a few comments describing confusion over adding another product to the myriad of permutations that MLBAM already offers, but this should be a case study on monetizing digital content.
MLBAM is taking its valuable [...]

ESPN Mobile Strategy Hitting Stride

After waiting out its Verizon partnership before entering the smartphone application world with its Scorecenter app earlier this summer, ESPN is about to go full throttle with its mobile strategy. Announced this week, the Worldwide Leader will debut a Fantasy Football iPhone app and an ESPN Radio app for the iPhone and Blackberry, along with [...]

Boston Sports Web Scene Will Be Telling

Traffic statistics show ESPNChicago.com is a ringing success, blowing away its online competition in the nations 3rd largest market, though it’s unclear how ESPN attributes traffic from many of the pages shared with its local site and core ESPN.com web property. Regardless, it’s next foray, into the Boston market, proves to be more telling.
Boston media [...]

Don’t Blame the Cable Guy For Channel Carriage Disputes

For the past few years it’s been the NFL Network battling cable providers, now the NFL’s latest creation, the Red Zone Channel faces a similar fate, meanwhile the Tennis Channel wages war with Cablevision in NY. As fans all you want is the channel and all you hear are the networks chirping about how the [...]

YES Network Marketing Follies for Live In-Market Streaming Package

“Watch the Yankees when you’re locked out of your house?” I know that’s not the first thought when I’m locked out, it’s a distant second, with everything else behind gaining entry! Yet, that is how YES Network is pushing their product to the market place.
When the Yankees, YES, and MLBAM announced the first live in-market [...]

Arroyo Proves Banning Twitter Makes No Sense

Sports news on Wednesday included the Ravens and Steelers publicly stating they have no policy on Twitter, hardly news if you ask me. News about who can tweet and what the penalty is and when they can tweet has quickly become nauseating. Partially because it’s not really news, but second because these policies are haphazardly [...]

Essence of SEC New Media Policy What Content Owners Need

The SEC partnered with XOS Technologies last month to form the SEC Digital Network, and the conference didn’t execute the deal for charity purposes – they intend to generate revenue, potentially lots of it. Put aside the mega 15-year television rights packages with ESPN and CBS Sports, the SEC, as many major college conferences do, [...]

ESPN Live Twitter-Type Coverage Good Thought, But Not There Yet

After a week of many negative Twitter stories, it was great to see ESPN experiment with its use in real-time, live game coverage, which can be a sweet-spot value proposition for the microblogging tool. ESPN employed Baseball Writer’s Jayson Stark, Rob Neyer, and Amy Nelson, now legendary Bill Simmons, the Stats and Info group, and [...]

ESPN, NFL Make Misstep with Twitter Rules

At least for a week, sports has helped catapult ‘Twitter’ past ‘Google’ in America’s mainstream technology vernacular. ESPN, NFL, reporters, players, leagues, teams – everywhere you turn it seems someone is making policy, discussing a policy, or defying one. It’s outrageous. Warrants a multi-part blog because there’s so much to comment on.
First, the live microphone [...]

Teams Should Not Just Let Players Tweet…

Like it or not (I happen to), Twitter is the flavor of the year, and athletes are embracing it. Teams or leagues that try to stop it or ignore it will be left behind. Similar to children, the more teams reprimand players for using it, the harder they will try to find ways around the [...]