Yahoo! and MLB Advanced Media, LP (MLBAM), the interactive media and Internet company of Major League Baseball, announced a three-year video and advertising partnership that includes access to out-of-market MLB games on Yahoo! Sports. The agreement will make MLB.TV available on Yahoo! Sports, bringing Yahoo! users more than 2,400 out-of-market Major League Baseball games each year, live and on-demand, through the 2010 season. Additionally, Yahoo! will exclusively manage online advertising sales for MLB.TV in the 2009 and 2010 seasons. This deal represents a continuation of Yahoo! Sports’ commitment to delivering the most compelling sports content on the web while significantly increasing the amount of high-quality video advertising inventory available to Yahoo! advertisers.
Yahoo! Sports will offer MLB.TV to fans in 11 countries, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, UK, Philippines and Germany. The games will be available through a co-branded player on Yahoo! Sports at http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb and MLB.com. During the first year of the deal, Yahoo! and MLBAM will jointly sell advertising for the video inventory, using Yahoo!’s advanced video ad format, Clickable, in addition to traditional pre-roll and post roll formats. For the remaining two years of the agreement, Yahoo! will be solely responsible for selling video advertising inventory for MLB.TV. All of this will be powered by Yahoo!’s industry-leading advertising management platform, AMP! from Yahoo!.
The agreement also provides that Yahoo! Sports will distribute MLB.com’s FastCast, a quick highlights-based recap of the previous day’s games, and can utilize select other MLB.com video content within Yahoo! Sports’ original programming. MLB.com began offering live streaming video of games in August 2002 and launched the first full-season subscription video product in professional sports the following April. Since that time, more than one million fans have subscribed to MLB.TV.
Originally posted on April 10, 2008 @ 9:05 pm
Yahoo is trying to catch up in the sports market which is a good idea but they still have to close more deals than this one with mlb to say they are top in the sports field.