MLB commissioner Rob Manfred hailed the league’s live streams on Facebook as “a great experiment,” on Tuesday. He added that the audience for the exclusive Wednesday afternoon games has skewed about 20 years younger than traditional broadcasts.
Speaking at the Leaders Sport Business Summit in New York City, Manfred said the move from weekly Friday night games (that were simulcasts of linear TV broadcasts) to exclusive Wednesday afternoon games had driven traffic up by a factor of five or six.
Manfred publicly acknowledged the price tags of the Facebook rights deals for the first time, saying the 2017 package for Fridays was $7 million, but the exclusive Wednesday games cost $30 million. And, he added, the partnership will likely continue.
“I expect we will move forward with Facebook, and I think that we will continue to refine the offering in order to test how effective that platform can be in terms of delivering our games, particularly to fans that may not be engaged with the traditional broadcast offering,” Manfred said.
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He referred to the 2017 venture, when Facebook live-streamed Friday night games, as dipping “a toe in the water,” saying the results were “interesting but not overwhelming.” But Manfred said these social media streaming plays were a big shift from past work. Previous efforts by MLB, which include the highly successful At Bat app and the MLB.tv OTT package, were all owned and operated by the league.
“The theory that underlay those products originally is that we were driving traffic to our platforms,” Manfred said, later adding: “As time went by, we came to realize that it was important to be on platforms beyond our own, where people were going for other reasons.”
Manfred noted that Facebook’s new Watch platform had enhanced the viewing experience considerably, and the league has been working with the social media giant on fine-tuning that package—even mid-game. The depth of the demographic viewership data collected had also been a key benefit to the league.