Thursday, February 22, 2007

MLB Strikes Out With Marketing

Major league baseball is trying very hard to chase away its fan base and make football the national pastime. The latest move is to shut out fans who would like to buy out of market games by signing an exclusive deal with DirecTV.

As detailed by Associated Press, baseball is close to signing a contract that would take away the "Extra Innings" package from cable and Dish Network customers, 230,000 of whom paid for the service last year.

So fans will have to switch to DirecTV, watch online, or give up on watching their favorite team that happens to play somewhere else.

Baseball's online package is less than half the cost of Extra Innings, so you could also pay for SlingMedia's SlingProjector, which sends web video to your TV. MLB is inadvertently promoting broadband TV by forcing people to go online to watch.

Fans have Senator John Kerry on their side as he is threatening Congressional action if the deal goes through, but we know how well he does at trying to win a majority.

Baseball owners every year offer even more ridiculous salaries, raise ticket prices, and move more games away from free to pay TV. If the sport were trying any harder to get fans to go elsewhere it would be hockey.

MLB has a great opportunity to attract fans by opening up its archives of games through ad-supported broadband, but they insist on trying to sell subscriptions and DVDs. While they will only sell a handful of DVDs per year of any game, they could get thousands of people to watch online and generate serious ad revenue. Huge opportunity lost.

Posted By John Gartner at 01:00 PM
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