Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yup. So again, this is where it’s really impressive. By the end of the season, same season in 2002, they started experimenting with streaming video online. And nobody’s doing this in these days, this is 2002 - three years before YouTube. The first game that they streamed is in late August. They streamed a Texas Rangers and New York Yankees game online. The quality is terrible but people loved it. And then they kind of raised to build a product around this and then by the end of the season, they sell a nine-game pennant race package. So streaming games online, people are paying for this. Then they sell a $20 post-season package and people love it. So then they scramble during the off season and by the start of the 2003 season, they do a full launch of MLB.tv and for $80 for the whole season, you can stream every out-of-market game on the internet. This is huge. Until this point, whenever people wanted to watch baseball, they had to turn on ESPN or their local sports or regional sports network and they could only watch what was being shown. Now all of a sudden you pay $80 directly to Major League Baseball and you can watch every out-of-market game whenever you want at any time on the internet. It’s pretty awesome. Yeah. The speed at which they were able to do that is pretty laudable and the way they were able to do it. Because you sort of think in a business that’s dangerously cyclical and seasonal like this where you sort of only have one shot per year to introduce something new for the season, the idea that they did their first little test with just streaming one game and then another little test with a post-season package you can buy and then came out with the real deal for that $80 full season package which I think got 100,000 subscribers, so like $8 million in revenue from that first season that went fantastically well. I mean, that's iterative development and they were able to do it even within the constraints of this. You could very easily see management saying, “Well, you know, we’re going to try that for next year.” I think what’s super impressive, like two things. One, this is 2003. Again, we’re years before YouTube. Nobody else is really doing streaming video at this time.…

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