IBC Executive p42
http://issuu.com/newbayeurope/docs/ibc2015_executive_summary/42
The hottest player in TV right now is the technology wing of Major League Baseball. Arguably it has been the hottest player for over a decade, pioneering live streaming of video content below the radar and accumulating a wealth of expertise that has seen it courted by HBO, Sony and ESPN.
“We've been doing OTT before the term even existed,” says Joe Inzerillo, CTO, MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) – known as BAM. “We feel like even Netflix got a boost because we were doing OTT before they were.”
Inzerillo joined MLBAM in 2003, three years after the unit was set up to create websites for the 30 MLB teams and to consolidate MLB’s digital rights. He had started his career as a cameraman with Chicago White Sox before moving on to direct video operations for the league. At MLBAM he set about creating MLB.tv, a streaming service so successful it has become the poster child of how to do video on the internet, worldwide.
“The hallmark of what we've done is scale and the dimensionality of that scale,” says Inzerillo. “We had to deliver over a million plus streams concurrently and routinely. When we started doing this the technology simply wasn't around. We had to build our own, in-house, and figure out compression, geofencing, and multi-application delivery at scale.”
In addition to streaming over 2500 baseball games a year it handles the back-end duties for World Wrestling Entertainment’s streaming channel and Turner Sports’ (college basketball) March Madness. It powers Sony PlayStation Vue and delivers subscription OTT for golf's PGA Tour.
Capping that, last month MLBAM signed a ground-breaking $600 million six year deal with
National Hockey League (NHL) in which MLBAM takes control of NHL digital and broadcast rights, including NHL.com. NHL took a 10% stake in BAM as prelude to a forthcoming spin-off which will see the separate company valued somewhere between $3-5 billion.
The tech unit's skills are in such demand that HBO turned to BAM to launch its subscription OTT service HBO Now with Game of Thrones season 5 in April.
“The cable market has such huge penetration in the US I'd say that it has held back the market for OTT,” says Inzerillo. “So you can't underestimate the upheaval HBO's gutsy decision meant to the deal flow in the global market. It says OTT is 100 percent mainstream. No question.”
The company has just signed its thousandth employee having grown ten times its size in 2003. “I'd be surprised if you don't see us expand into Europe,” he adds. “We hope to get an anchor tenant very soon.”
With a burgeoning sports portfolio there are some suggestions that an independent BAM could bundle these into a digital only service to rival ESPN. Others see in its deal with HBO the potential to become a content service provider on par with Amazon and Netflix. Either way, could BAM turn competitor to its current partners?
“We are already in a situation where the whole TV ecosystem is 'frenemy' – folks partner and compete with each other,” says Inzerillo. “All those decisions are in the hands of our CEO. My personal belief is that I'll be involved in some form in all of it still [post spin-off]. I've been very involved with the OTT expansion of our business and I expect it to expand at an increased with an infusion of cash.”
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