theibcdaily


Executive Summary 31 Preparing for the future


Managing fragmentation


Joe Inzerillo Executive Vice President & CTO,


Major League Baseball Region: United States


Interviewed by: Carolyn Giardina


“The complexities of the intersection of sport and technology and OTT has kicked toward a crescendo of radically different business and distribution models in how we communicate with our fans. The exciting part is that there are a lot of validated models, and not necessary any of them are wrong. There may just be many ways of talking to your fans and getting content to them.


“We need standards that


are actionable... and to drop some of the posturing”


“With all of these opportunities comes enormous fragmentation — in the business model, the devices, the technology. These things take their toll on the bottom line. Fragmentation can be a good thing for making incremental dollars; sometimes those are offset by the technical and operational challenges of delivering across the array. It used to be that if you wanted to get a lot of eyeballs watching something, you’d just buy a TV spot or participate on television. Now if you want to do the same thing you may need 30 different touch points —Facebook, Twitter, TV, OTT. The big thing is managing the fragmentation and deciding when is the right time to fragment to go after a group of users you think are going to have some staying power versus things that are very fad-like that you don’t see as having a lot of traction.


“We sell a lot of subscriptions;we have one of the largest sports OTT offerings that pay. We do sponsorships and advertising as well. An advantage to sports is, except for European football, we have built-in breaks. There are times where you can be charging for a subscription, but you still have two minutes you have to fill and people are expecting advertising. I think the most successful models that we see are ones that have a blend of sponsors, advertising and direct-to-consumer pay product.


“Chunks of the technology sector are bleeding money out of the sports and entertainment area because of all this fragmentation. That's really unnecessary. As an industry, the more we get standards that make sense and are actionable, and drop some of the posturing around standards, the more it would be better for everybody. I find it particularly interesting to see how these different business models mature globally. Traditionally, the TV markets have been very different between the US and Europe and Asia. Some of the business models that are direct to consumer work in a more universal way. Folk all around the world can relate to something like Netflix. It’s an exciting time.”


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