America's Pastime

Major League Baseball Advanced Media: America’s Pastime Goes Digital
It was January 29, 2010. At the Chelsea, Manhattan, offices of Major League Baseball Advanced Media (commonly referred to as BAM), a team of executives, product managers, and engineers had gathered in a fifth-floor conference room as Bob Bowman, BAM’s chief executive officer, energetically walked in to lead their weekly mobile meeting. Among the team members were Chad Evans, director of mobile product development, and Tracy Pesin, director of mobile engineering, who had just returned from a three-week assignment at electronics giant Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California – a visit that culminated in Evans and Pesin sharing the stage with Apple’s chief executive officer
Steve Jobs in the much anticipated unveiling of Apple’s new mobile device, the iPad.
It was fitting that Jobs had selected BAM to showcase the only sports-related application for the iPad.
BAM was widely regarded as having the best league website and being one of the most remarkable success stories in digital media in general.1 Started in 2000 with a relatively minor investment from each of the 30 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams, BAM now generated around $440 million annually from ticketing, paid content, advertising, and merchandising. In a digital environment in which most media businesses had failed to find viable business models, BAM, in 2009, had amassed well over 50 million unique visitors per month and 1.5 million subscribers paying for multimedia content delivered via the web, including half a million subscribers for BAM’s flagship video product MLB.TV priced at $100 or more a season, while the company’s At Bat Apple iPhone application was the second-highest selling “app” in Apple’s iTunes store in 2009, with two million downloads and 60 million videos streamed since its July 2008
debut.
After congratulating Evans and Pesin for pulling off their demo of a baseball app for the iPad to much acclaim from a worldwide audience of technology enthusiasts, Bowman quickly steered the meeting to the project’s next steps. He knew much work was still to be done in the roughly 60 days until the iPad’s launch in March 2010. All BAM had was the set of screen displays shown during the iPad unveiling that gave an idea of the look and feel of the product, how video highlights could be integrated, and how users could access statistics on players, games, and game settings. An actual working app still had to be built, and critical marketing decisions would have to be made. What would be the right name, set of features, and price for the new iPad app?
Each of the mobile-team members weighed in on the decisions.
“You just don’t know in this technology world what is going to take hold,” concluded Bowman, as he reached for his third Diet Coke. “The iPhone has been a great success, which led to strong sales for our At Bat app, and the iPad could become equally important. We have got to get this right.”
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Professor Anita Elberse and Brett Laffel (MBA 2010) prepared this case. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.
Copyright © 2010, 2011 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800-545- 7685, write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to www.hbsp.harvard.edu/educators. This publication may not be digitized, photocopied, or otherwise reproduced, posted, or transmitted, without the permission of Harvard Business
School.