October 30, 2013

Baseball’s Big Data Bet Pays Off

Baseball fans are “the most digitally-wired on the planet.” And that is paying off very well for Major League Baseball.

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There are somewhere between 200 and 300 pitches thrown in every baseball game. With 30 teams playing 162 games per year, that adds up to a lot of data, and Major League Baseball crunches this data in real time. That makes baseball fans “the most digitally-wired on the planet.” It is also paying off very well for Major League Baseball.

“We bet on video in 2002 before most folks were even looking at video,” says MLB Advanced Media CEO Bob Bowman in the video below, “and then we bet on mobile in 2005 three years before the iPhone.”

So how have these bets paid off? The site MLB.com attracts 12 million visits per day and the MLB At Bat app is the top-grossing iOS app.

Watch the video here:

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

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