Major League Baseball Advanced Media was a tiny startup inside of a huge organization. Now it's not just on the brink of changing the game, but the rest of television with it.
San Francisco Giants players celebrate after winning Game 4 over the Detroit Tigers to clinch the World Series on October 28.
Image by Mark Blinch / Reuters
While most tech startups battle for any media attention they can get, this company has been around since 2000 and doesn’t seem to care much if the public knows it exists. It doesn't hide from the media, but unlike most companies in its field, it's loathe to self-aggrandize or make big claims about changing the world.
The truth, though, is this company may soon be poised to upend the whole television industry. Even more curious, it’s a company silently owned by traditional American icons known for their hidebound ways: a bunch of baseball teams. This is Major League Baseball Advanced Media, a tech startup company owned equally by the 30 clubs that comprise the MLB.
Glass walls abound in the four sprawling fours of offices, housed in New York City’s Chelsea Market, the site of a former Nabisco factory in Manhattan. Banks of cubicles with an army of twentysomething video editors and game loggers prepare highlights and information for MLB’s Web properties and apps. A huge, unnecessary metal dome sitting in the middle of one floor seems to serve as a conference room. Despite the baseball artwork on the walls and the company softball trophies in the reception area, there’s no mistaking it: This isn’t a sports company. This is a tech company.
Started by MLB in 2000 to, among little else, run the official websites of the 30 teams, MLBAM has since grown tentacles extending control over various businesses around the sport, such as the news media and ticketing, raising plenty of eyebrows along the way. Its technologies have brought change to the game itself, facilitating the sport’s use of video replay and PITCHf/x, the precise computerized strike zone system MLBAM that regularly embarrasses the game’s umpires and appears to have the ability to replace them in the sacred act of calling balls and strikes — that is, if a sport so wrapped up in its own traditions could ever take that power away from its historic arbiters in the interest of getting the calls right.
The most impressive part of MLBAM’s operation, though, is its giant video streaming control room, which keeps expanding to larger spaces. Technicians in two long rows here monitor a giant video wall of several hundred screens, each one showing a different broadcast MLBAM is streaming. This single room could spell doom for cable, satellite, and broadcast television.
During the regular season, in one cluster of screens, you can see the 30 broadcasts of the 30 MLB teams, which MLBAM packages into MLB.tv — viewable by millions in HD online, on TV through connected devices, and on smartphones and iPads. This growing service, around for a decade now, becomes more and more sophisticated than regular cable telecasts each year and comes at a current annual cost to viewers of $85 or $100.
It’s a natural arrangement. Fans who do not live in the broadcast market of their favorite team would like to watch them play, but the regional sports networks (RSN) that broadcast the games do not appear in cable or satellite channel lineups in their area. MLB.tv pays the RSNs for their broadcast feeds and provides them to viewers. Every game across the country is available to watch, as long as it isn’t airing in the viewer’s local market.
Over the past decade, this simple arrangement has necessitated and allowed MLBAM to build itself into a video-streaming powerhouse. Very quietly, it has come to stream more live video than any other company on the planet, its servers dependably handling the load of tens of millions of viewers watching multiple broadcast feeds at the same time. If the entire country suddenly cancelled their cable and satellite service and switched to MLBAM technology for all of their live TV watching, one gets the sense the company is not far off from being able to handle it.
And that, after all, might just be the plan.