iCooperstown

In an alternate reality, Bud Selig and MLB have decided to address the glaring mistake that is their current digital media policy. The MLB brain trust has decided to create a site called iCooperstown. A digital hall of fame, where the user can access a large archive of games and clips, including no hitters, perfect games, players stealing home, triple plays etc. In addition to being able to access this information, there is a fan area where users can grab these videos and edit them into their own top 10's, season recaps, music videos and anything else they can create. Let's say for the initial creation of the site MLB plans an overall cost of $3 mil for development and server access. At first the plan is for the website to be free but with ads similar to the original Hulu model. Once the site is launched, MLB sees a large jump in viewers in the 18-34 demographic as well as in increase in viewers under 18. It is so popular that MLB needs to add additional servers to handle the traffic. Executives decided that in order to fully monetize the site they will release even more content including full seasons of games, previously inaccessible material but, like the NYTIMES, now they will charge for access to the previously free material once a certain amount of free hours are exceeded. This paywall adds further development costs, takes away the ad revenue and drastically reduces the newly won young audience.When the smoke clears and costs are assessed, a young analyst reviews the report and says to his boss, "This is great and all, but why didn't we just put this stuff on youtube and save ourselves a bunch of money?"

Therein lies the question for Major League Baseball. Unlike the other major sports, MLB staunchly dislikes it's videos to be posted on Youtube and other websites. In fact a quick search of "MLB" on Youtube mostly returns videos clips from video games such as MLB 2K11 or MLB 11 posted by users. And yet, the national news media really has not taken Mr. Selig or the league as a whole to task. There is no NYTIMES or ESPN exposé on why this information isn't available and no real explanation why they act so quickly to take videos posted from fans down. Though blogs have attempted to cover this issue, the only national figure that I could find who has mentioned this is ESPN's Bill Simmons. He has made mention of this issue on numerous podcasts, but still no progress has been made in allowing the fans access to great feats of the game that are so essential to the baseball experience. So here I throw down the gauntlet to any writers or anyone that might read this, to challenge MLB to become more digital media friendly. Write articles, blogs and tweets until they relent because the future and the past of the game are at stake.

@the_ombudsman