A return to the good old days doesn’t seem likely for either baseball or the Internet.
As the Major League Baseball season began earlier this month, teams continued to ask fans for more money to support their insatiable habit of signing players to preposterously large contracts. The average player now earns more than $2 million a year, and the Texas Rangers are paying shortstop Alex Rodriguez roughly 628 times the annual salary of a decent high school teacher.
Online content producers, meanwhile, are in a similar dash for cash now that the financial markets are coming around with brass knuckles, looking for some return on their dot-com investments. No longer is it enough to serve interesting, cutting-edge content to millions of Net users; it’s time to get paid.
These two money-grubbing forces have combined to bring an end to free streaming audio Webcasts of Major League Baseball games. The service that once married the charm of old-time baseball with the simple utility of the old-school Internet has been victimized by the relentless push for profits.
Webcasts of baseball games became widely available in 1998, when Major League Baseball began paying Yahoo and Broadcast.com to provide them as a service to fans. The cost was relatively low, since teams already employ announcers and production crews to broadcast games on the radio.
The service was an instant hit with fans, particularly those that live far away from their hometown teams. Dodgers fans that left Los Angeles, for example, could once again hear the smooth voice of Vin Scully calling the balls and strikes in Chavez Ravine. Many fans have an almost romantic bond with the local broadcasts of their favorite teams, so these Webcasts provided a welcome reunion.
Perfect medium
They also proved to be a perfect test for the developing medium of streaming audio. There’s no need for bandwidth-hogging stereo, since most fans are accustomed to listening to games on AM radio. And while the interruptions caused by slow connections and network traffic can spoil a song, they’re more tolerable in a baseball game.
Proof that this experiment was successful arrived this spring in a new deal between Major League Baseball and RealNetworks, maker of the popular Real Player software and aspiring media giant. The company paid the league $20 million in cash and services for the exclusive right to Webcast the league’s games.
RealNetworks (www.real.com) sells access to these games for $4.95 a month as part of its premium subscription audio service, which also includes music, concerts and other entertainment. If you only want the games, Major League Baseball offers a better deal at its Web site (www.mlb.com). For $9.95, you get online access to every game broadcast this year, plus a $10 coupon toward the purchase of caps, jerseys and other merchandise at the site’s gift shop.
It’s hard to complain too much about the prices. In an age when it can cost a family of four $100 or more to attend a ballgame in person, paying between $10 and $30 for a season’s worth of Webcasts doesn’t seem too bad.
But then, getting people to pay for anything online is almost as difficult as hitting a Randy Johnson slider. And Major League Baseball has made some enemies already by forcing local radio stations to pull their own Webcasts offline. Stations including Chicago’s WGN, which is owned by the company that distributes this column have posted protests on their Web sites telling fans to blame the league for the lack of free Webcasts.
Hesitant fans
Fans also might balk at paying for the same show that’s available for free on the radio. Teams already rake in millions of dollars in advertising revenue from their radio broadcasts, and the people listening online are hearing those same ads. While some of those advertisers are local companies with little use for out-of-town customers, the rest could be asked to pay extra for the thousands of fans they’re reaching online.
And presumably they will, as soon as the league and its partners establish this new revenue base among Internet users. Before long, teams will be collecting twice for the same Webcast once from listeners and again from advertisers. And then they’ll be able to afford to overpay a few more aging superstars and untested phenoms.
When it comes to fans and their money, there’s no play in baseball that the league likes better than the squeeze.
To contact syndicated columnist Joe Salkowski, you can e-mail him at [email protected] or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.
