MLB Advanced Media's Bob Bowman Is Playing Digital Hardball. And He's Winning.
Photo by Dan Saelinger
The first week of January 2010, Apple called Bob Bowman with an invitation shrouded in even more mystery than usual: If you want in on our next project, send us your two best people. That's all Bowman, president and CEO of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, or BAM, had to go on. Losing two tech leads during the hectic months before Opening Day was risky. Worse, Apple wouldn't be able to tell him what the techies were building, when its project would come out, or how long they'd be gone. But making the decision took Bowman "under 10 seconds." Two years earlier, Apple had made a similar offer and MLB had struck gold with AtBat, its iPhone app. Bowman sent mobile developer Chad Evans and another engineer to Cupertino, California, the next day.
Bowman didn't see Evans until three weeks later--standing onstage, during the launch of the iPad, when Evans introduced MLB's new app to the world. It would be able to play gorgeous video of live major-league games while simultaneously displaying the latest stats. "Nice job," Steve Jobs told him backstage. But BAM's work was really just beginning. The dazzling two-minute demo was the equivalent of a movie trailer, and Bowman's team still had to make the actual movie. "Everyone said no one would use the iPad," says Bowman. "It's the wrong size. It's been tried before, blah, blah, blah. We said, 'Hell, yes, we're in.'"
BAM built a best-selling app for the new device in less than two months--the sort of execution that has made the MLB subsidiary an unlikely tech powerhouse. In fact, Bowman's team now sets the standard for broadcasting live sports--or any live video, actually--on web-connected devices, offering viewing options that make a DVR seem primitive. On the Xbox 360, BAM's newest platform, you can navigate with a wave of your hand or with your voice (Xbox, Rangers-Angels . . . Xbox, play). "It's the future of watching sports," says Todd Stevens, executive producer at Microsoft. And BAM, he says, "just gets it."
Before The New York Times or Hulu charged online users, Bowman's group created one of the most successful paid-content models. Last year, a total of 2.2 million people bought BAM's AtBat iPhone and iPad apps (among the top-grossing in iTunes) or paid BAM up to $120 to subscribe to MLB.tv, the service that airs every out-of-market Major League Baseball game (most local games are blacked out). Because BAM operates behind the scenes, its technological prowess and financial success rarely attract much attention. But it now belongs to a small fraternity of digital stars. BAM's business is more multifaceted than YouTube's; last year, it sold more than 35 million MLB tickets, more than half of the league's inventory. It streams more live video than any other sports entity--and any other company. How did a game that revels in tradition produce something so cutting-edge?
BAM, says baseball commissioner Bud Selig, isn't only a great sports-business success. It's "one of the great stories in American business."
Twelve years ago, Bud Selig, the league's 77-year-old commissioner, gave the ball to Bowman; Bowman, in turn, built a business. He's undaunted by the inherent tension BAM creates with media partners, broadcasters, even the teams themselves. (After all, the Yankees don't run their official website. BAM does.) "If there's no tension, you're not going to get better," Bowman says. And if this centralized approach restricts the clubs, the revenue keeps them from complaining (at least publicly). Between tickets, ads, apps, and streaming subscriptions, BAM generates around $620 million a year in revenue. When the club owners considered spinning it out as a public company several years ago, the value of its IPO was estimated at $2.5 billion. Baseball's digital arm has quietly proven itself to be New York's top tech startup of the last decade. "I think it's not only one of the great stories in American sports business in the past 12 years," says Selig, "but one of the great stories in American business."
Joe Inzerillo, BAM's senior vice president of distribution, is sketching on a whiteboard at the company's headquarters in New York's Chelsea Market. He's explaining how BAM processes, packages, and delivers live video. It's far more complex than what its better-known peers do when serving up prerecorded TV shows, movies, and homemade clips. As he draws out how it works, Inzerillo seems genuinely amazed it's even possible. Because until recently, it wasn't.
MLB's Digital Sluggers: BAM CEO Bob Bowman, second from left, with his colleagues, from left, EVP of revenue Noah Garden, distribution SVP Joe Inzerillo, and content EVP Dinn Mann | Photo by Ian Spanier
"I'm simplifying," Inzerillo says. But let's take one pitch--one of around 300 thrown in a typical game. When Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander releases the ball, a TV camera captures the pitch. BAM gloms onto the feed at the local- or national-TV production truck outside Comerica Park and relays the video to its data center in New York in less than a second. There, in a control room where an entire wall is a patchwork of screens, engineers ensure that the video and audio are in sync. At the same time, pitch speed and location data, measured by computer-vision cameras throughout the ballpark, are integrated to correspond to Verlander's pitch. Then a bunch of encoders do, well, whatever encoders do to convert video for web streaming. BAM's ingenuity lies in transforming the broadcast feed into a standard format that can quickly be adapted for various tech platforms and screen sizes. Teams of loggers and cutters, working under the watchful eyes of every imaginable baseball-player figurine and bobblehead, tag the highlights so that they can be packaged.
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MLB Advanced Media's Bob Bowman Is Playing Digital Hardball. And He's Winning.