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Did you know MLB has an App Game that Could Enable You to Win $5.6 Million?

April 17, 2012 by 2 Comments

A few weeks ago we looked at a number of apps that Major League Baseball has made available to fans, including the ever popular MLB.com AT Bat 12 as well as the recently released At the Ballpark, both of which have been very well received.

What I missed was the app Full Count that delivers streaming content and the fact that the game that fans can participate in to try and break Joe DiMaggio’s all-time consecutive hit streak is not only an app but has a $5.6 million prize, so a short comment on both is worthwhile.

Full Count is an app that was developed in conjunction with Yahoo! Sports and it provides a range of features including up to the minute player and team stats, scores, live look-ins at key plays and in-game progress video highlights.

A user can pause a video and rewind it if they so desire and they can follow an embedded twitter feed that includes ones from analysts, commentators and MLB.com insiders. The program is free and can be accessed on iPads, iPhones and on PCs. This looks to me like the second best thing to watching a game at work.

The second app is called MLB.com Beat the Streak presented by Scotts and it involves an effort by fans to participate, but that have the potential to win a $5.6 million grand prize. To play you pick one or two players from a list supplied by MLB on a daily basis. If your player gets a hit on the first day you have the start of a streak. You keep on selecting for as many days as your players keep you in the game, if you have a day with no hits you are set back to zero, but can start again.

There is no limit to how many times you select any individual player, and you can make selections up to 10 days in advance, a boon to those with weekend duties or travel obligations. The contest ends with the end of the 2012 regular season. The first to reach 57 consecutive games wins.

To play you need to register at www.mlb.com/bts or www.mlb.com/fantasy and then download the app, which is currently for iPhones, iPod Touch and iPads only.

This strikes me as a great way to keep fans not only engaged but actively following all players to ensure that they have a hot hand and pay attention to what pitchers their selected hitters will be facing.

Filed Under: Apple, Apps, Athlete to Follow, Baseball, Contests, Fantasy Sports, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, Major League Baseball, Smartphone, Twitter, Yahoo Tagged With: ,

Brandon Phillips Says Twitter Helps his Game

April 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Baseball managers from Little League to the major leagues often warn their players about the dangers of distractions and how it will impact their performance on the field-the only thing that matters to a manager.

Well the Cincinnati Reds’ All-Star second baseman Brandon Phillips claims that Twitter (@DatDudeBP) is not only not a distraction, but that his heavy use of it has helped his game last season. For the record last year he hit .300, scored 94 runs and had 82 runs batted in and won a Silver Slugger award..

Phillips said on the Jim Rome show that the technology helped him both personally with all of the positive feedback and with an effort by himself to only say positive things on his feed. But he even found that the haters, ones who said that he would not accomplish anything helped to motivate him to remain focused on the field.

From the sound clip that is linked it is obvious that he enjoys the interaction with fans and that it has helped him open up to fans, and it has led to him providing his own giveaways at the ballpark.

On the flip side there is always Tim McCarver, the Fox Sports baseball announcer who does not like any form of social media at all. In a recent interview he went so far as to say that nothing is as disturbing as social media. When not making these remarks he is presumably outside telling people to get off his lawn.

Hopefully this will be a trend that more athletes follow. A lot have engaging personalities but remain distant from fans for a huge variety of reasons, including ‘haters’ as Phillips said. This allows them to reach out and really develop new bonds for fans and athletes both on and off teams that they root for.

Filed Under: Athlete to Follow, Baseball, Cincinnati, Fox Sports, Major League Baseball, Twitter Tagged With: ,

MLB.Com At Bat 12 Popularity Soaring

April 12, 2012 by 1 Comment

Bad weather is always an unfortunate fact of life, even more so when it coincides with the start of the baseball season. The joys of watching your favorite team play can be severely dampened by an early season rainstorm.

Yet fans are watching games in record numbers, by using MLB.Com At Bat 12, an app that baseball’s interactive media arm MLB Advanced Media, has been publishing for the last five years.

As the time has passed the popularity of the app has grown tremendously and this year the app passed the 3 million download mark, fur months faster than it managed to achieve last year. And yes. Last year was also a record pace for the program.

Fans are not just downloading the app, but they are using it with great regularity, unlike all of the education apps on my phone. MLBAM has reported that the service is seeing an average of 800,000 live audio and video streams daily since the season began.

We covered most of the details here earlier this season, but in a nutshell it is an app for Apple’s iPhone and iPad as well as Android devices and costs $19.99 a month or $109.99 a season to watch games.

This shows how multifunctional users are finding their smartphones and tablets and how a sports league can meet the fans needs at a price point that does not break the bank for fans.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Baseball, iPad, iPhone, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, Major League Baseball Tagged With:

MLB Network adds New Channel for Highlights: The Strike Zone

April 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

MLB Network expands its broadcasting presence, part time, with the introduction of the Strike Zone channel, which a number of its cable partners have agreed to carry in a number of markets large and small across the nation.

The channel, which will only broadcast part-time, will be available currently from DIRECTV, Dish Network, Bright House Network and Time Warner Cable and will be designed much on the model set by the NFL Network’s Red Zone, providing live look in at games and important at bats as well as providing game highlights, all in high definition.

Initially it looks like Time Warner customers will be the big winners as it will be offering the channel in these markets: Albany, Austin, Buffalo, Charlotte, Cleveland, Columbia, Columbus, Corpus Christi, Dallas, El Paso, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Milwaukee/Green Bay, New York City, Palm Springs, Portland, Raleigh, Rochester, San Antonio, San Diego, Syracuse and Waco.

Interesting that I live in one of those markets and did not know that Time Warner was available here. Anyway then Bright House will be offering the programming in five markets. Two in Florida with Orlando and Tampa; Bakersfield, California, Indianapolis and Birmingham, Alabama.

Dish Network will include it in its ‘Multi-Sports’ package while DIRECTV will offer it as part of its ‘Sports Pack’ and its MLB Extra Innings plan.

When MLB launched its own network the thinking was that this would put pressure on ESPN’s Baseball Tonight and I believe that it did, bring its level of professionalism up a notch. Now with a competing highlight show I expect that we will see a much broader assortment of highlights and game breaks from ESPN covering more teams than the few that it seems to favor.

Filed Under: Baseball, ESPN, Major League Baseball, Time Warner Cable Television Tagged With: ,

Friday Grab Bag: Intel Launches Major Ultrabook Campaign

April 6, 2012 by 1 Comment


Intel is launching its biggest marketing campaign in over a decade with what it calls a multi-faceted global push for the “New Era of Computing”. The company will be on the television, in the print media and using a variety of social media driven efforts to get and hopefully hold consumer and corporate attention to these ultra-slim notebooks.

This is not surprising first after CEO Paul Otellini’s keynote at CES earlier this year had so much emphasis on the notebooks. Second, and this is something that seems to have to some degree gotten by (at least me) under the radar. There are already 26 models available for purchase worldwide including offerings from Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba and Dell with additional 10 models from Acer, Fujitsu, Gigabyte and Lenovo having been announced.

Next week is the start of corporate earning reports and I will be very interested to hear what Intel executives say about the sales of notebook computers as well as how its effort to establish itself in the tablet space are going.

Recently Apple talked about the death of the PC but really what are you going to use to write the apps for the iPhones and iPads? I kid, I think that the desktop PC may become a dinosaur but notebooks will have a strong demand from a large segment of the corporate and consumer market.


Is Tiger Woods the true #1?
Or at least so says Rory McIlroy, currently the #2 ranked golfer in the rankings. He said that if Woods is on his game he is the best golfer in the world, adding that you cannot judge a player on how they have performed in the last few weeks. If we go by that it really does not look too good for Tiger, but then this is a nice change from the usual trash talk that happens in sports. This weekend could also change his opinion.

iPhone to reach regional carriers later this month?
Apple Insider is reporting that five regional U.S. carriers are going to announce that they will begin selling Apple’s popular iPhone on April 20. The carriers are Alaskan Communications, Appalachian Wireless, GCI, Cellcom and nTelos.

The report also states that the carriers will for $50 less than the so-far subsidized price at other carriers, with phones starting at $150 for the 16GB model, $250 for 32GB, and $350 for 64GB. The older iPhone 4 will be available in an 8GB version for $50.

Samsung and Apple hurting HTC sales?
Smartphone developer HTC has reported a 70% drop in profits while revenue dropped 35% from the same quarter in the previous year. The company has recently expanded its offerings with four additional smartphones, all running the Android operating system.

At the same time Samsung has reported record quarterly profits of $5.15 billion, with very strong results pulled in by both its smartphone business and its Galaxy Note hybrid tablet/smartphone products.

Is Google really losing billions on Android?
A piece at Yahoo.com argues that the company is and that it is because of a number of reasons, however I found it rather unconvincing. With 300 million Android phones out on the market and 15 million tablets the company has a huge installed base and seems poised for huge additional growth.

NBA to sell ads on jerseys?
Over at HoopsHype the bet is that the NBA will very soon have ads on players game jerseys. It makes a persuasive argument about how, among otrher things. MLB is a business and it just does not make sense to leave money on the table.

Baseball has twice, to my knowledge, played a series with ads on its uniforms. Both were in Japan and so not seen by most American fans. It seems inevitable that ads do come to that space and as the article points out, the Dallas Mavericks came out with ads on their uniforms in 2009.

I think it will be interesting to see what types of rules the league, and others when they follow, will set for who is acceptable and who is not. Can Hooters advertise? Alcohol? I am pretty sure tobacco companies need not apply.

Joe Posnanski departs SI
While a bit late on this but for fans of Joe Posnanski, his work at this weekend’s Masters Tournament will be his last for Sports Illustrated as he is leaving to join the growing USA Today/MLB Advanced Media joint venture.

If you are not familiar with him, you should give him a try. I feel that he is one of the best sports writers around, offering solid information backed by facts, all with a good dash of humor. He was at SI for roughly three years and he will be hard to replace.

Filed Under: Amazon, Android, Apple, Apps, Google, HoopsHype, HTC, iPad, iPhone, Major League Baseball, NBA, Samsung, Smartphone, Sports Illustrated, The Big Lead Tagged With: , , , , ,

MLB Continues Strong Push in Social Media

April 6, 2012 by 1 Comment

While doing basic baseball research, i.e. watching a bunch of Opening Day games on television, I noticed a funny thing happening on Twitter, as a huge number of postings were coming with the #MLBTVme hastag.

The hastag is apparently part of a bigger effort to promote MLB’s MLB.TV according to a number of sources, which all seem to lead back to Mashable. The official site for MLB.TV had no press release on this topic, at least one that is easily found.

Apparently what is happening is that MLB’s @MLB account tweeted a number of trivia questions, and fans that answered correctly were entered into a drawing for a number of nice prizes including iPad and Xbox 360s.

The network used a very clever ploy to get the event out in front of fans that use Twitter. The longer the hastag trended at Twitter’s national and global trending charts the more prizes were awarded to fans that participated. Since it was a trivial contest, and most baseball fans that I know love baseball trivia (and most other forms) this was sure to be a hit.

According to the article MLB has also launched a series of social media correspondents at each of the ballparks, and if you are interested in what it takes to be one some of the job listings are still available online. There will also be a tumblr and pinterest accounts for each team.

I was amazed at the range of additional offerings that MLB has for fans. While I dig around at its site fairly regularly, there were a number of offerings that I was not aware of including a variety of contests, including one where fans pick a player a day and see if they can get a hit with each one until they pass Joe DiMaggio’s famous hit streak.

In addition, for those of you that like to follow individual players on Twitter, here is a pretty good list, courtesy of the MLBLogs Network of almost 300 MLB players that have twitter accounts as well as a few additional important baseball hashtags that you might want to follow.

As we have noted n the past MLB has been very aggressive in pushing all forms of social media and interactive content in the last decade and this is a extremely nice push. Fans love their teams and can now show it in additional ways, helping to strengthen the bond between them, while at the same time rewarding the fans for participating.

Filed Under: Apps, Athlete to Follow, Baseball, Contests, Live sports via mobile, Major League Baseball, Mashable, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: ,
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