DEADSPIN via THE BIZ OF BASEBALL gets out the stopwatch, as Major League Baseball is enforcing a new 120-second limit on online material.
Starting this season, media websites cannot have more than two minutes of audio or video made from “league facilities”, and game highlights are “restricted only to rights holders that have a separate rights deal with MLB Advanced Media.”
Also, the news sites can’t post more than 7 photos from a game and can’t create their own photo galleries. In addition, “non-text content created at MLB ballparks cannot stay up on a news outlet Web site for more than 72 hours.”
The new policy is similar to the NFL’s 45-second rule that allows even less footage for online news organizations.
But leave it to D-Spin’s Will Leitch to put MLB’s new rule into perspective: “Just 120 seconds! Sheesh, that’s not even one Steve Trachsel pitch.”
Oh, snap!
1:21 am on February 27th, 2008
Luckily for sports fans, there aren’t 120 seconds of entertainment to be found in a day of MLB.
It’s pretty obvious that the major sports orgs haven’t the slightest clue what it is they’re trying to protect. The value derived from having an exclusive control over footage longer than 45 seconds will get you a cup of coffee at Evil Green Dot if you contribute three bucks. Stringent controls only serve to weaken a media product’s popularity, because the popularity is sustained solely by keeping the public’s attention. No video yields no attention, no attention yields no push into the public conscious, no share in the public conscious means that nobody gives a crap.
Here’s a suggestion to the sporting league execs. Listen to your _fans_, not your bean counters. Bean counters don’t add value. Fans add value. Happy fans add more value.