August 30, 2009
Remember when you received your first fax? Remember when you sent your first email? Remember when you watched your first baseball game on your IPhone?
Major League Baseball announced in July that it will stream every MLB game to its MLB.TV subscribers. Live streaming is—or very shortly will be—available to those subscribers on their computers, their IPhones or their IPod Touch devices. The cost: 99 cents per game. Think about it. You’re a Tigers fan living in Birmingham and your team is playing at Boston. Got an IPhone and a buck? You’re watching the game.
It is one small step for baseball, one giant leap for how information and entertainment are disseminated. What’s next? I’ll bet you a stadium hot dog and a Coke it will be the National Football League, sometime during this season. By next year, college football will follow.
So who wins and who loses in this deal? Apple wins. There’s one more reason to buy one of its products. The consumer wins because more customized entertainment becomes available. Traditional media is the big loser. Audiences are already shrinking. Wait and see what happens to those numbers in the next three years, and not just because of this breakthrough.
The bottom line: Advertising backed by sound strategies still works. But the quickly changing landscape requires a wise and careful investment of ad dollars.
Have a great week.
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