Baseball League Offers Complete Game Downloads

Who gets the rights to offer downloads of a major American sport? The that sports’ league itself. Major League Baseball is offering downloads of this year’s US baseball quarterfinal and semifinal games, plus video clip of highlights from regular season games. Each quarterfinal or semifinal game clip costs US$3.95, is approximately 400-megabytes to 600-megabytes in size, and is in RealOne format for Windows PCs. MLB.com permits purchase only for personal use, but allows people to cut thsee files onto CDs.

For years, various sport sites have lobbied MLB (and other sports’ leagues) for rights to stream live games and to offer video downloads of finished games. In an era when sports leagues insist that they themselves own the rights to all images of their games, it shouldn’t be surprising that that Major League Baseball keeps those rights, directly offers those videos online to consumers, and keeps the revenues. It’s simply another case of disintermediation between events and the people.

Will FIFA, NASCAR, the NFL, NHL, NBA, the Formula One management, and the UK Premiership follow the NBA’s lead? We think so.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.