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Major League Baseball is the latest pro sports league to reconfigure their league app with an approach similar to a social media user experience.
Major League Baseball is rolling out one of the biggest updates it has ever made to its digital products, particularly to its signature MLB app. The league’s chief operations and strategy officer, Chris Marinak, gave SBJ Tech Week attendees a first look at the changes during his presentation on Thursday.
“We believe the optimal viewing experience for a major league fan is a completely personalized experience,” Marinak said. “Every single person in this room should be able to make the screen look the way that they want it.”
The highlights of the overhaul are a new Home tab with personalized content, a new Watch tab for videos and significant new features to enhance the ways fans can consume the live game, including more data overlays and immersive 3D renderings.
The change begins as soon as a user opens his or her app. The new landing page, which can be accessed at any time via the Home tab, is configured like a news feed, mimicking the UX most fans will be accustomed to from social media. In addition to being able to select a favorite team, users can opt to follow individual players to news, stats and video.
“We’re building you a completely customized home tab that’s unique for you,” Marinak said, emphasizing MLB’s interest in investing in digital content to foster a “first-party, direct relationship with our fans.”
Under the Watch tab, the MLB app will surface live games, highlights, original programming and shoulder content that will be relevant to the preferences of each user. Previously, streaming minor league games required a separate app and subscription, but now 7,000 minor leagues games will be included in the MLB.TV package, as well as a reduced-price MLB At Bat option (a rebrand and expansion of what was the MLB Audio option that includes radio broadcasts).
“We think that’s a big boost for us in terms of reaching our audiences,” Marinak said, “and we think it’s a big boost for us in terms of promoting the next generation major league superstars.”
While attending games remains baseball’s “flagship experience,” Marinak said, the league wants to ensure that fans can follow games from home — or from anywhere outside the stadium — as closely as they’d like. One feature exclusive to iPhone and iPad users is the ability to select one game that can be tracked live on the device’s lock screen, an easy way to quickly check the score or open directly to more game coverage.
Within the MLB.TV viewing interface on selected connected devices, fans can select Gameday mode. That will enable the augmentation of the game with custom data overlays, so data-minded fans can see such metrics as spin rate, velocity and launch angle on every pitch and swing.
“When we talk about the future of sports viewing, you’re going to see more and more of this type of technology available for fans to be able to consume content digitally using tracking data above and beyond what you see on the broadcast,” Marinak said.
Even more immersive is the new Gameday 3D. Relying on the Hawk-Eye-captured Statcast tracking data, a digital rendering of the game is produced that allows fans to review the action from any vantage point on, above or around the field. Viewpoints are no longer relegated to where cameras are placed but, rather, can be virtually placed anywhere.
Such replays have existed previously, but fans could only passively view them. Now, they can actively control the experience. This tool can be accessed during live action for one game per day — the daily free MLB.TV game — but can be used for all on-demand games.
“What it allows you to do view the game from any angle: stand behind home plate and watch the game, stand behind the pitcher’s mound and watch the game, do a bird’s eye view so you can see where the defense is positioned and where the runners were when the [action] was happening,” Marinak said.
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SBJ I Factor presented by Allied Sports features an interview with Danita Johnson, president of business operations for D.C. United and a member of Sports Business Journal’s Forty Under 40 class of 2023. Johnson talks with SBJ’s Abe Madkour about learning how to sell and to not fear change, becoming an effective manager, the importance of empathy as a leadership trait, and what to look for when evaluating job candidates. SBJ I Factor is a monthly podcast offering interviews with sports executives who have been recipients of one of the magazine’s awards, such as Forty Under 40, Game Changers and others.
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