Flex Application Development

Case Study: MLB.TV®

MLB.TV®, the online video player for MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL®, streams over 2,500 games live and on-demand to 500,000 subscribers worldwide. The online experience allows fans to enjoy many more features than the standard television experience provides and do so even if they’re far from their home team.

MLB.tv

Simulated media player image

MLB.com's proprietary speed detection allows high-speed customers to enjoy an HD quality picture -- up to 720p -- on any size monitor. Just like a DVR you can pause, fast-forward and rewind live games to let you watch the games on your own time. Subscribers can watch up to four games at once, or watch one and track the highlights of another with picture-in-picture capabilities. Users can further customize their experience by choosing whether they want to listen to the radio or television announcers and selecting either the home or away video feed for each game.

Fantasy players will find useful features like real-time highlights and player stats that automatically load into the media player. Simply click on a highlight and the clip instantly launches in a picture-in-picture window. They can also customize alerts to feature entire fantasy rosters or just a list of favorite players. Subscribers will be notified any time a listed player is on deck and can click the real-time alert to watch live at-bat look-ins.

CNET News Interview with Bob Bowman
CEO, MLB Advanced Media

Q: How much better is your video player this year?
Bowman: The experience has been everything that we did not have a year ago...Nobody has seen true high-def before on the Web. (With this year's player) you can put it on any screen you want, there's no degradation at all. It has all the bells and whistles, picture-to-picture, DVR-quality pause, rewind, fast-forward, real-time highlights. The meat-and-potatoes of it of course is the picture quality itself and it is eye popping."

Q: What did you see in Flash that impressed you?
Bowman: You see several things. You see a high-grade product that's in some form on 99 percent of the browsers. You've got something that's got mass usage. Secondly you see with Adobe a company committed to the customer experience in video with the Flash Player. We see a partner that continues to invest in their product. They have the same desire that we do. They want the Flash Player to be the best thing anybody has ever seen and we want that. When you partner with people like that, it's not a philosophical discussion. We know where we want to be now how do we get there.

Major League Baseball trademarks and copyrights used with permission of MLB Advanced Media, L.P. All rights reserved.

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