Disney Said to Buy Stake in $3.5B MLB Web Unit | Hacker News Reader

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

bloomberg.com

65 pointssswezey51 comments

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

You're probably right. MLB has been around a long time, and somehow they still maintain an antitrust exemption, so they probably know what they're doing.

Why is piracy not a good option yet for sports? I'm surprised considering most shows are available in high quality within minutes of broadcasting.

Because "within minutes" isn't the same thing as "concurrently with". There are pirates who attempt to provide that, but generally fail in terms of reliability, quality, etc.

There is, at least for the NHL. It's still not completely reliable but I can watch every game of the regular season and playoffs much easier than using gamecenter (and cheaper). The blackouts are really bad for the NHL. When I lived in Canada, every game for every team was watchable with no blackouts. In the bay area? I can't watch any of the Canadian teams even though they're certainly not in the same market, along with Nashville, New York, St Louis, basically all of them and of course San Jose, LA, Anaheim.

It's useless. So the free streams that are available are amazing.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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)

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/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/HBONow/comments/4ow6eb/anyone_else_...

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.

It gave me that error even after logged in. Whatever they do to validate your session token every time you try to watch a video also goes through that server. If it keeps you from watching videos even after logged in, it doesn't matter that it's not the video server itself.

It does matter... because this discussion is about the relative merits of MLB's video service, not HBO's shit frontend.

The fact that Game of Thrones didn't work is not MLB's fault.

The authentication server is clearly MLB's software. If you check the stack trace, it's com.bamnetworks which is them.

Yep, you're right! Good catch. Here's an exception I captured,

[Unexpected Exception] [com.bamnetworks.registration.types.exception.UnexpectedRegistrationException] Caused by [java.util.concurrent.RejectedExecutionException: Task scala.concurrent.impl.Future$PromiseCompletingRunnable@213cefb1 rejected from java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor@78721c64[Running, pool size = 2000, active threads = 2000, queued tasks = 5000, completed tasks = 5842]]"

And looks like com.bamnetworks owns the MLB.com android app,

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bamnetwork...

I don't think so. Tested on multiple connections (including symmetric gigabit with great peering, and 0 issue with HBO GO) but HBO NOW is... garbage.

Their video player wouldn't go fullscreen for a while on any of my or my girlfriends computers.

Besides a minor UI bug in their video player which I didn't really care about, I've never had a single issue with HBO Now. (Including GoT on release night)

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

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.

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).

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

My understanding of the situation is that Go really wasn't able to handle the load being asked of it, so HBO looked to build a successor. They ended up outsourcing it to MLBAM.

Refs: [0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/hbo-to-use-mlb-advanced-media-fo... [1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/23/mlbs-bob-bowman-on-streami...

Internal politics.

The load issues were prior to (and sparked) the switch to MLBAM.

According to the Verge's article at the release of HBO NOW, it's been MLBAM for HBO NOW since its launch.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/4/9090897/mlb-bam-live-stream...

The NHL service had similar issues last season, especially at roll out. I love the MLB service, but NHL left a great deal to be desired.

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...

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.

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.

And HBO

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

What's so unbelievable about that?

Up until 2016, NHL was with Neulion. NBA is currently with Neulion. NFL is currently with Neulion.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

[2] http://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/11/finally-mozilla-adds-workin...

So glad to see Disney get involved in everything.

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...

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