Live Baseball on Your iPhone

Taking one more small, but important, step towards offering customers what they want where they want it, the MLB is rolling out a new iPhone app that takes advantages in the 3.0 software update.  The new app will allow users to watch live streaming coverage of out-of-market baseball games right on their iPhone over either a 3G or WiFi connection.

This is certainly cool.  The one thing I miss since cutting my cable TV is coverage of the occasional live sporting event.  Slowly but surely, the major sports leagues are coming up with ways for viewers to enjoy events without commiting to expensive packages of programming, the majority of which you are not interested in seeing.

We are getting closer to the day when you can simply pick an event, pay a fair price, and enjoy the coverage on the screen of your choice.  What this will mean to the licensing deals that have been the life-blood of cable operators for years, is still to be determined.  One thing is certain, as distribution becomes less and less reliant on the cable companies, the cable companies are going to find themselves quickly dislodged from their current position as an unwelcome monopoly.

The MLB app will cost you $10, and as long as you don’t follow the local team, seems like a pretty good deal.

Pondering Pandora’s Possible Profits

Pandora is easily one of my favorite streaming music sites and one of my most used iPhone apps so I can’t say I was shocked to read that they are headed toward profitability within the next year:

Revenue may double this year to about $40 million, Westergren, 43, said in an interview yesterday in San Francisco. The advertising-supported service has 27 million registered users and is adding members at 50,000 to 60,000 a day, faster than in previous years.  LINK

Now, I have no idea what their costs are for running the site, streaming all that data and paying the royaltees but $40 million in revenue is pretty good for a site that doesn’t charge users.

However, a closer look at their numbers has me wondering.  With close to 30 million registered users and $40 million in revenue, it means that Pandora is only making a little over $1/year per registered user.  That strikes me as awfully low.

Napster just launched a plan to let user stream specific music for $60/year ad-free.  I wonder if Pandora’s 30 million users would pay, say $5/year for an ad-free version of Pandora’s current service?  That would be $150 million in revenue right there.  Plus, Pandora is already fully portable, unlike Napster.

Cable Companies Try to Get Some Online Pie

There are plans brewing for cable companies like the atrocious Time Warner Cable to begin offering “exclusive” online streaming access for subscribers to programming currently not being offered via sites like Hulu.

Top cable-television providers and TV networks are exploring a sweeping solution to the threat of online video: putting large numbers of cable shows online, but accessible only to cable subscribers. (via)

Let’s take a quick look at why this is destined to fail.

1) They consider online video a “threat” that they can somehow defeat when it seems pretty clear that online video is here to stay.

2) Cable companies think they are going to be able to make content accessible only to cable subscribers. Our short internet history has shown pretty clearly that these “gated communities” are easily and quickly circumvented by those unwilling or unable to gain access “legally.”

3) By attempting to lock up content behind over-priced and inflexible walls pirates will simply be more motivated to  offer consumers a superiour alternative.

4) Right now I can find and view just about any TV program online without subscribing or paying via any number of legal, quasi-legal and illegal streaming sites not  to mention the myriad p2p solutions.  Cable is not likely to be competitive with this offer.

5) Attempting to build a business model on the concept of “scarcity” when your product is a digital video file that easily copied and distributed and then trying to charge for this artificial scarcity is just plain absurd.

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Turner Sports Reads My Mind – NBA All-Star Game Just $.99

I have written in the past that I thought the networks and major sports leagues would be better off offering some sort of ala carte method of watching games online instead of the hefty “season pass” approach of subscribing to all the contant at once.

Turner seems to be taking a step in the right direction (via):

Turner Sports will provide live video coverage of this weekend’s NBA All-Star game online and via an iPhone app (streamable over 3G!). While the video will be live, it is not a webcast of the televised game, Turner still wants you to watch the action on oldteevee (along with all those ads). Instead, iPhone and web watchers will get four different camera angles.

Available today, the iPhone app is 99 cents; it will feature live streaming coverage of Saturday night’s skills competitions (dunks, 3-point shots, etc.) as well as Sunday’s All-Star game.

While this might not replace the experience of watching the game at home, at the lack of broadcasters is a mixed blessing, this is an exciting development and one that hints that TV will not long be the dominant platform for live sports.