OC Register: Hoffarth: MLB on Facebook – not in our wildest streams

[AngelsWin.com]

Faced with a futuristic prospect of having Facebook, YouTube, Amazon and/or Twitter on board as a new revenue stream and distribution partner. Major League Baseball experienced a whole bunch of post-Easter egg all over its interface last week.

Maybe not everyone was able to watch the entire hard-boiled humiliation. It’s a shell game that’s still buffering.

We’re all for healthy competition when it comes to the traditional media platforms producing live games – it’s our expectation that someday sooner than later in your lifetime, you’ll experience a Super Bowl on some sort of service you know best nowadays as a way to order inflatable palm trees and sturdy tiki torches to decorate a patio for a summer luau without running to Costco.

But in the first exclusive Facebook Watch episode Wednesday – a Phillies-Mets game from New York that would have otherwise gone unnoticed to the local TV markets as well as the MLB.tv out-of-market package – it got caught in the dragnet of a current tarnished, maybe-soon-outdated Internet social media company still trying to explain how millions of its customers had personal data improperly shared with political ads during the 2016 presidential election.

Things were bound to act like an Uncle Charlie Hough knuckleball, starting with the fact the game had a 90-minute rain delay, graphics that blocked the screen and comments that scrolled too fast to even read at times.

In 2017, MLB and Facebook did a trial run, borrowing 20 games from local rights holders for a Friday national simulcast on the social media platform. Assured all would work well enough, Facebook decided it was worth bribing the MLB folks with a reported $35 million – about $1 mil in extra walking-around-money per team – to lock in a 25-game exclusive rights fee to have a weekday, otherwise non-descript contest taken away from two teams and put on its service.

What could go stupid wrong with this?

Strange bedfellows

First, many have recently dropped Facebook, fearing their information was being compromised. But for those who participated, Facebook was in a position to mine data from this MLB relationship and sell it off to third-party advertisers about where one was viewing a game, and what kind of comments were being made. Beautiful.

Next, those who paid up to $120 a year for all out-of-market game access on MLB.tv were now told that, no, this one is now not part of that promise. Complain if you wish.

Doug McIntyre did.

The L.A.-based morning host of his own KABC-AM (790) news talk show, a Daily News columnist, and a home-grown Mets fan took to his Thursday morning program to amplify his disgust in the whole process.

He even registered a complaint online at MLB.com, but the tone-deaf result was that MLB.tv agreed to credit his account for that lost game and then cancel the service – neither of which McIntyre demanded. He was then forced to go through another half-hour-plus process of re-registering.

“Facebook has done nothing wrong in trying to grow its business with livestreaming,” McIntyre said. “Even though it was sloppy and the feed crashed, those things happen, and they’ll work on the technology.

“The problem is that the MLB sold out their fans. Their slog is ‘every out-of-market game all season long.’ They violated the contract, and violated our trust in having a package that promised all out-of-market games. That’s the great frustration in all this. So week after week, another two teams’ fans will have the same issue, and there’ll be complaints, but not enough to make a large difference.

“We live in bizarre times where people are now asking for government regulation on digital use, going against what the free market usually does to regulate itself.”

As McIntyre also connected dots, this isn’t all that different from how the Dodgers, with the MLB’s blessing, have used fans as collateral damage in their distribution struggles. If enough people disconnected their DirecTV service in Southern California over the Dodgers/SportsNet LA issue over the past five years, parent company AT&T would have seen enough in a cost benefit analysis that its brand and customer base had been damaged. Neither things happened.

So we continue to take one for the team, the league and the suspect social media platform, and slog forward.

Who’s up next?

The Dodgers, Angels and every MLB team go into each season knowing they could have as many as nine games lifted from their local schedule and taken by ESPN, Fox or TBS. That’s one thing. The exposure is pretty good, and the teams are compensated well.

Games on Facebook are announced at the start of each month, so we know that only Milwaukee-St. Louis (April 11), Kansas City-Toronto (April 18) and Arizona-Philadelphia (April 26) are locked in for more fun and games.

Yet those three national networks would probably fight harder to keep a Dodgers or Angels game for themselves at some point in this six-month season rather than have Facebook snatch it away, so the odds aren’t as likely that Southern Californians will suffer this layer of confusion and anxiety just witnessed by many in the Philly and N.Y. markets not prepared for this inconvenience.

The Dodgers are one of seven teams, along with the Blue Jays, Pirates, Astros, Rockies, Orioles and Nationals, whose games are available on either an RSN or, when lucky enough, a national broadcast, so cord cutters don’t always do well surviving this situation.

The other somewhat ironic part to this is some Dodgers followers have already figured out some end-arounds to the SportsNet LA access — Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) or a Virtual Private Network (VPN), watching on Chromecast or Roku, hiding their L.A. location from MLB.tv through Unlocator.com, which unblocks streaming services.

But Facebook has also been a cyber-communal gathering spot for not-so-secret society of those who transmit their SportsNet LA feeds onto their FB accounts. It has created a group-watch experience, complete with commentary, that some rather enjoy.

There is some merit to this way in which people are going to use Facebook and MLB feeds, one that behooves both companies to get ahead of it. But ultimately, if MLB thinks it is tapping into a younger demo by having a Facebook relationship, someone there must know that, while there are plenty in the 18-to-34 range among the 2.2 billion monthly active users, the average age skews at 40 and older.

The numbers that came out of the Wednesday experiment also show there were 1.1 million engagements and 4.3 million views of at least three seconds, along with 68,000 comments. Not at all a threat to the main delivery of games over TV sets.

As Michael Mulvihill, the Fox Sports guru of research, strategy and analytics, explained on Twitter on Thursday, the average length of a view on the Facebook game was just a little more than three minutes as people likely popped in and out.

“The audience for Facebook’s game supports the idea that streaming is only a complement to TV for sports, not a replacement,” Mulvihill said. “When your audience is (more than) 90 percent lower than the lowest-rated broadcast game ever, that’s not much of a case for replacement.”

Facebook released a statement Thursday that read in part: “We’re still in the early days of having live sports on Facebook Watch and are learning with every broadcast we have on the platform.”

Tony Petitti, the deputy commissioner of business and media for the MLB, said earlier in the week to New York Newsday that “we are just trying to figure out ways to bring our content to as many platforms where fans aggregate as possible … Obviously it might be a little tricky, but we want to be respectful of our fans. There’s always going to be, when you test new things, a little bit of disruption.”

As to how that disruption measures out, we’ll leave it for Cambridge Analytica to crunch the numbers for its Facebook friends.

Measuring media mayhem

What smokes

* HBO’s presentation (Tuesday, 10 p.m.) of the documentary “Andre The Giant” comes primarily from the Bill Simmons Media Group and WWE, one of the original “30 for 30” pieces that Simmons had lobbied for almost 10 years ago when he was at ESPN. The narrative of André René Roussimoff, who died at 46 in 1993, was how a man 7-feet-4 and almost 500 pounds survived as an athlete and actor at a time when he really wasn’t in on the joke.

* ESPN has a “SportsCenter All-Access” real-time look into “what it takes to create the iconic sports news and information program” on Tuesday at 7 p.m., following the Yankees-Red Sox telecast, and continuing until 9 p.m. Steve Levy and transplanted Fox Sports West guy Michael Eaves anchor with Elle Duncan and Marty Smith to go around the studios, control room and highlight-editing work spaces. Sounds slightly intriguing as much as it can be self-serving.

What chokes

* The L.A. market wasn’t much help in getting a viewership push behind Monday’s NCAA men’s basketball national championship game that featured a one-sided Villanova victory over Michigan. With the game on TBS predictably drawing fewer eyes than it would on CBS – it did an all-time low 10.3 overnight — L.A. came in at 8.0, 49th out of the 56 markets. L.A. was even less robust for Saturday’s Final Four, also on TBS, with a 5.7 rating (47th nationally).

* As part of the new ESPN+ over-the-top, $4.95 service that ESPN will launch starting Thursday, a 15-episode “basketball analysis show” called “Detail,” created and hosted by Kobe Bryant, will be available through the NBA playoffs, the parties announced this week. Otherwise, the “exclusive content” for this on-demand platform for the redesigned EPSPN app isn’t all that impressive — limited live MLB, NHL, PGA, tennis, MLS and boxing events, but no NFL. There is also access to a documentary on the volatile life and times of former Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight (who ESPN then decided to hire as a college hoops analyst), and the “30 for 30” doc library. If you want to be an “early adapter” to this service, knock yourself out.

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