March 29, 2024

M.L.B. Media Company Buys Rights to Live Concert

The concert — called the Global Citizen Festival — has no connection to baseball, and that’s partly the point. MLB Advanced Media says it wants to distribute all sorts of live events in the future, some free to users and some on a subscription basis.

“We want to gain experience selling worldwide rights,” said Bob Bowman, the chief executive of the division, which is jointly owned by the league’s 30 clubs. The clubs all stand to profit as the division sells its live-streaming services to more and more purposes.

Already, MLB Advanced Media provides the back-end technology for Glenn Beck’s Internet television channel, ESPN3’s streams of sporting events and an in-flight TV service on Southwest Airlines, in addition to the hundreds of out-of-market baseball games that it makes available through MLB.tv.

Mr. Bowman said the league saw opportunities to own the distribution rights to programming, just like television networks historically have.

It is not the only digitally oriented company thinking along these lines: last week, according to the technology news Web site AllThingsD, Google’s chief executive, Larry Page, and the National Football League commissioner, Roger Goodell, met and discussed, among other things, the Sunday Ticket package of football games that DirecTV currently distributes. DirecTV’s rights to Sunday Ticket expire at the end of the 2014 football season, and Google could outbid the satellite company in the future.

When the Google-N.F.L. possibility initially surfaced in news reports, “no one laughed, no one thought it was odd,” Mr. Bowman said, asserting that it was just a matter of time before such situations start to come true.

With the Global Citizen Festival, MLB Advanced Media is turning around and distributing the concert — which it will produce with AEG, the live-event giant — in a number of ways.

“This is the first time we’ve ever purchased worldwide rights for TV, radio — well, what we used to call TV, what we used to call radio — and digital,” Mr. Bowman said.

Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys, John Mayer and Kings of Leon will perform at the second annual concert, which will be held in Central Park in September. The event is a fund-raiser for the Global Poverty Project, an antipoverty advocacy group.

“The idea is to maximize the eyeballs for it,” said Noah Garden, an executive vice president at MLB Advanced Media. He said it would be live-streamed on Web sites like YouTube and The New York Times and will most likely be repackaged into a two-hour special for a major television network. (Those negotiations are continuing.)

“Live events are content that people want. I think you’re going to see more and more of these,” Mr. Bowman said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/business/media/mlb-unit-buys-rights-to-broadcast-live-concert.html?partner=rss&emc=rss