EconSports: Q&A With Bob Bowman
On Overall Content Strategy:
I think all the leagues are doing a good job optimizing their content. We do 15 games a day, we play all the time our content is fundamentally different than all other games. Baseball, our job is to promote the game all day whereever it is. Three TV parntners ESPN Turner and FOX, what we try and do is recognize what works for us works for us but also understand what works for [TV partners] and try to accommodate it.
On Digital Rights Agreements:
In 2001 it was sort of we don’t know what it is People are smarter today in terms of knowing what it is to have a digital contract, in 5 years people are going to get more comfortable about simulcasting…an eyeball online is arguably more valuable than an eyeball on TV.
On Free vs. Paid Content
Increasingly I think folks are going to realize that the ad market is not a bottomless pit…I think you’re going to see more and more people charging for content, doing what cable does which is charging for subscriptions and having ads. 95% of our content is ad free but I don’t think you want to be in business always ad supported
On Mobile:
Mobile About 15% the usage is exploding, during the season we’ll do about 12-15 million page views on Mobile. Apple and RIM have been very smart…in terms of usage reliability, I guarantee while we’ve been sitting up here everyone has checked their blackberry it may not be a major part of our business but we have to be there and there’s no choice.
They certainly want information whether it’s the gambler or the avid fan, they want real-time information. The Apple application they like, people want video but the screen size needs to be bigger, [for video] the iPhone is the first device that works for us.
On Measurement
We’re big fans of getting it right, since you can get it right you should. The notion that you can hire a panel and get them to be honest about what they do at work…it’s pure poppycock. That’s why we have a boss button. We all have logs, everybody has logs, we hope that some day everyone will look at the log files and say that’s what it is.
Nobody’s going to tell the truth about what they actually do. I don’t know anybody that thinks that panels work. People should be auditing these log files, most everybody who’s large looks at Omniture. [Nielsen numbers are ] off by a factor of 10. When we get paid they care about impressions so they look at our log files, the only time it matters is when our reach is 58 million, and Nielsen is saying it’s 12 million.
On the Current Players Association Contract
Players Associate has been a good partner, we would anticipate restructuring our deal and getting it more in line with the way the world works. They’ve been great partners of ours and we’re continuing to work with them.
On MLB Network:
We’ve never been able to partner with a cable network, we have partners now we’ll be able to have both, we’ll be able to go out and do ad sales and it will be great for the fan first of all and it will be good for MLB.com.
On Licensing Philosophy
The pricing reflects two things to us today. The first thing is the business value, there is a value there, we’re all moving a little bit at a time so we don’t want to make a big deal that turns out to be a chump deal…if a deal doesn’t happen we still own the rights and we can still do it next year. We’re all trying to figure out how to move beyond the shores of our portal… you’re seeing a loosening up. In the ESPN deal, we gave them a lot more content than we did before that, I think you’ll see a lot more leagues do more of that.
On Subscription Products
We charge for live games. Most of our site has to be free not because a fan could go to ESPN, we hope to get to the point where we have some games that are totally ad supported and we hope to get to that in 2009.
On YouTube / UGC / Slingbox
[Some fans] are routinely stealing our highlights or republishing live games, it really has to be systematic, repeated for us to force them to take it down, we don’t think that it’s hurting our business model to allow some of that to occur [for related non-highlight / non-game content]. May see more opening up in 2009.
Slingbox encourages fans to utilize content in a way they shouldn’t use it. We’re not excited about it. Having said that, what do you do, we’re going to stand outside the door of fans that have bought a slingbox and ask them to pay a fee? You can’t do that, the way to win is you win it on technology, we’ve got things like pitchtracker, you win it on the loyalty of the fans.