You can watch today’s spring training game between the New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals for free just about anywhere you can point a browser, either on a desktop machine or an iPhone or Android. MLB.com is handing out embed codes so people like us can stream the game from our pages, and you can also check it out live on Facebook or Twitter.

Baseball has been playing with free Facebook streams for a couple years now; in the past, MLB.com boss Bob Bowman has said the idea has been “de minimus” as a conversion tool to his paid product, but he must think there’s some promotional benefit to doing stuff like this on a site with a billion users, because he keeps doing it.

Twitter is more interesting, simply because Twitter seems to be more and more interested in seeing what it can do as a video platform (for example: its upcoming music app, which will play music videos from Vevo).

Two years ago MLB.com streamed a minor-league all-star game on Twitter, but I believe this is the first time the league has used Twitter to show a game with real pros. My hunch is we’ll see more of this stuff in the near future.

Oh yes: And starting around 2 pm ET, you should be able to see the game below. Meanwhile, if you want to see Bowman live, head to our D: Dive into Mobile event next month in New York. Registration info here.

We had assembled some of the biggest names in mobile technology and a stunning array of demos for what was sure to have been an amazing gathering before a sold-out audience.

Sandy had other plans, of course, wreaking devastation across the area, including massive flooding in lower Manhattan, where we had planned to hold the event.

As we said at the time, we would be back. And now we are pleased to announce that Dive Into Mobile has been rescheduled for April 15 and 16, still in New York at the same (now dry) venue in Battery Park.

A number of our original speakers have confirmed for the new event, including Android chief Andy Rubin, Facebook engineering head Mike Schroepfer, Verizon Wireless marketing chief Tami Erwin, Major League Baseball’s Bob Bowman and Fabricio Bloisi, head of Brazil’s Movile.

Several other speakers are making sure the new date works, and we look forward to announcing them in the coming days and weeks. We are also working on adding a few big-name speakers that couldn’t make the earlier date.

While first crack at attending the rescheduled event will go to those who were initially registered, check our registration page to get in line for tickets.

In the meantime, we made the most of our time stranded in Times Square, filming video interviews with a number of the guests who were to have taken the stage in October. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop traveled all the way from Finland, only to be stuck in New York, while Xiaomi chief Bin Lin was in from China.

Especially worth a watch are our talks with three of the international Global Voices who had made it to New York. Asia Kamukama traveled from Uganda to speak at our conference and experienced her first hurricane instead. Thankfully, we still got a chance to sit down with Asia and hear about her work setting up solar-powered computer labs in rural Africa.

We also got to meet two of the amazing high school seniors who are part of MEET, a program that teaches technology and business skills to Israeli and Palestinian youths. Program alums Amin Manna and Yuval Yogev have come up with their own mobile app aimed at promoting impromptu events via smartphone.

Also up on our site are stories on several of the products that were to have demoed either onstage or in the App Showcase at Dive Into Mobile.

• Desti
• Panacast
• Zappar
• Snapchat
• Grubhub

While those products have now launched, we have our eye out for other incredible demos to share onstage in April.

It’s been nice to see all the euphoria at Yahoo about free food and Apple iPhones kicking it up a notch.

But, purple people, guess what? Them’s just your basic table stakes in Silicon Valley these days and pretty much everyone else has had such perks for a long while now.

Thus, as nice as it is to drink your coconut water gratis, after two months in charge, it’s long past time to focus on what new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is up to besides making much-needed but obvious cultural changes at the troubled Internet giant.

She’s been busy with the expected listening tour of employees and also outside tech players — such as former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel — which is a textbook stop in the turnaround playbook.

Now comes the hard part: Actually beginning to make the significant decisions about how she’s going to turn around Yahoo and what the key issues of strategic focus need to be.

In a series of recent meetings, according to numerous sources inside the company, Mayer has begun to outline what those are to top staff.

Not surprisingly, they are many of the same thorny issues that Yahoo has been facing for a long time and which center primarily on making the company relevant again in a wide number of ways.

I’ll get to many of them over the next week in a series of What Will Marissa Do? posts — including looking closely at her new hires, when and how Mayer will deal with inevitable layoff decisions facing the company, where the sale of Yahoo! Japan stands and, finally, what she’s cooking up for key Yahoo products.

But the focus has to fall first of all on search and advertising, the two arenas that Mayer has been studying most closely, according to numerous sources close to the situation.

That has included a recent meeting and numerous discussions with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about improving Yahoo’s search advertising partnership, said sources at both companies.

That deal has been largely disappointing since it was struck under the regime of ousted CEO Carol Bartz several years ago.

Many reasons are given for the poor performance of the entire arrangement, including lack of improvement of cost per click and share growth for both parties. That means bid density and numbers of advertisers remain too low, especially compared to Google’s offering of access to a larger, more active and lucrative market.

Simply put, despite massive spending by Microsoft on search, users and advertisers get significantly better results overall with the search leader Google.

(You can read a great piece by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan from last year, which exhaustively looked at the issues until then.)

The irony abounds that it’s up to Mayer to fix this problem of improving revenue per search with Ballmer, since she has been among the executives who have made Google the search behemoth it has become.

Her particular expertise has been on search experience for consumers, which is just the area that Yahoo desperately needs to improve after handing over technology duties to Microsoft.

That move was controversial at the time and some feel it was a big mistake. But, most also think there is no going back at this point, given the enormous cost of running a serious search enterprise.

Such an idea is still being raised inside Yahoo, although it seems more nostalgic than a realistic possibility, given the enormous price and, more importantly, the departure of the company’s core search engineers in recent years.

That doesn’t mean Yahoo under Mayer can’t be key to helping solve Microsoft’s search tech problems. She certainly knows the entire arena, which has already given Yahoo increased credibility among Microsoft’s search engineers.

“None of Yahoo’s many CEOs knew anything about search technology and that’s certainly not the case here with Mayer,” said one person close to the situation at Microsoft. “When she walks in, she instantly has status among the geeks as someone who knows what she’s talking about.”

It still may be a losing battle, due to Google’s overwhelming dominance, but if anyone at Yahoo can spot areas of even small improvement — which can yield big returns — it could be Mayer.

In addition, she can spearhead Yahoo’s own efforts to reverse — or perhaps simply stop — search market share declines via delivering a better consumer offering.

That’s still heavy lifting, no matter the exec, since both Microsoft’s Bing and Google are better equipped to win here, too.

“It hard to imagine we are going to slow down in any way,” said one former colleague of Mayer’s at Google to me recently in a rather ominous tone. “We’re only going to get more competitive.”

Pressure much?

And more: Mayer is under a time limit, since guaranteed payments Microsoft agreed to pay Yahoo for the shortfalls on what was promised will be running out next year. The pair has renegotiated that deal before, and it will likely have to do so again.

Of course, Mayer could try to walk and threaten to take Yahoo’s search business elsewhere, a move that former CEO Scott Thompson was mulling before his ouster.

That’s not a surprising ploy, except it is probably impossible to pull off, a fact acknowledged by top Yahoo execs.

“It might feel good to say we have options in search,” said one person close to the situation. “But that ship sailed years ago.”

Indeed, especially since Google is the only choice of possible alternate partners and such a move is rife with major obstacles.

There is the issue of the contract with Microsoft, which could lead to a potentially explosive legal struggle Yahoo can ill afford.

“They can try to get out of the deal,” said one high-ranking person at the software giant. “But that’s a lot easier threatened than done.”

And, there is the clear regulatory hairball any search hook-up between Google and Yahoo would lead to.

That’s happened before, which Mayer knows well since she was a top exec in Google’s business when it tried to partner with Yahoo as a way to prevent Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid for the company.

While times might have changed, Google is currently facing a likely battle with the Federal Trade Commission over its powerful search business, and trying to get Yahoo’s business now is a non-starter.

Thus, finally fixing the Microsoft partnership is key to Mayer’s success since it represents a little over one-third of revenue of Yahoo (see the chart below).

The bigger part of Yahoo’s business, as you can also see from the chart, has been display revenues. And that, too, has been a sorry tale of declines and ever more disappointing results.

A report by eMarketer on display market share had this depressing chart for Yahoo:

As is clear, the march downward for one-time leader Yahoo has been swift, and the prospects for the future are worse as Google and Facebook vie for leadership.

The reasons for this have been myriad, but Mayer has apparently decided that it’s been due in large part to the broken Yahoo ad tech platforms and their ever weaker performance.

As we have previously reported, she has determined that it’s now time to invest in improving them, both by funding internally and external acquisitions.

For that, she has formed a tight group of execs to scan the landscape for tasty and innovative treats for Yahoo to gobble up.

That includes: Scott Burke, SVP of Yahoo’s advertising and data platforms; Brian Silver, who runs the company’s Right Media Exchange; Xuhui Shao, a key engineering VP under Burke; and Mark Morrissey, the longtime tech exec who previously ran the company’s search business and was key to integrating the Microsoft search deal into place.

The cerebral Burke especially has been pushing ad platform improvement for a while and finally seems to have won the battle against detractors of the big and possibly grandiose plan by appealing to Mayer’s interest in not giving up.

Thus, the tabling of plans by Thompson, as well as interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, to outsource some of the automated parts of the display business to Google.

Those talks were very serious, as well as others to sell off Right Media, but they are done for now.

One major issue — the people in charge of the ad platform turnaround could also be seen (and most definitely are) as mired in Yahoo’s legacy of lackluster results and poor performance.

“It is kind of funny that the guys responsible for the decline now have the responsibility for fixing it,” said one source at Yahoo.

It’s a fair point to be made.

But that’s water under the bridge, apparently, since the group has been making the rounds, helped by Yahoo’s M&A execs, with a wide range of companies in many different ad tech area being considered (and some dismissed), including: Mediaocean, Turn, Criteo, PubMatic and Millennial Media.

Millennial is the most interesting, because it is a mobile ad play, where Yahoo is exactly nowhere (to be fair, less than nowhere) after years of botched efforts.

As with other companies, this is a critical arena for Yahoo, and yet one more that Mayer needs to focus on.

Lastly, Mayer has to make sure Yahoo’s premium display business remains strong. This is much more based on relationships with large advertisers than on major sponsorship and branding offerings, as well as creating consumer products and content that is appealing to marketers.

This area is now headed up by former Google exec Michael Barrett, who has publicly said he was staying put for now at Yahoo as its chief of revenue.

In fact, because he is in charge of all sales, he occupies the second slot under Mayer on Yahoo’s now strangely configured, punctuation-impaired and information-free management page.

But numerous sources inside and outside Yahoo said Barrett has also told many people that he is still not fully committed to staying in the role for the long haul.

If he eventually gets a lucrative exit package — something the new boss is not being very generous with overall, said sources — that will mean Mayer will need a high-profile and well-regarded ad exec to replace him; sources said Mayer has already begun reaching out to some candidates.

The pickings are slim, with only a few names on the list of those capable of taking on such a job. That includes: Demand Media’s Joanne Bradford, who was also a former top Yahoo exec; Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi; OWN’s Kathleen Kayse; MLB.com’s Bob Bowman; and any number of Google execs.

In that regard, as with all the other search and advertising overhaul efforts at Yahoo, it is a matter of attracting serious talent into the company going forward.

More on that — and more — to come.

Our next three speakers will talk about the role mobile plays in people’s lives around the world, in humanitarian efforts, entertainment and community, and sports. We expect them to be some of the most entertaining and memorable voices from our great lineup on Oct. 29 and 30 in New York City.

Katie Jacobs Stanton leads international strategy at Twitter, which she joined in 2010 from the U.S. Department of State.

Stanton spent two years in Washington, D.C., leading the State Department’s mobile donation campaign for Haiti, which raised $32 million for victims of the devastating earthquake there. She served as the White House’s first director of citizen participation, where she got the Obama administration tweeting via @whitehouse. Previously, she led development of products at Google and Yahoo.

At Twitter, Stanton is helping the company build out its international presence. She set up the company’s first overseas offices in the United Kingdom, Japan and Germany and is playing a key role in helping the company set up partnerships in Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Troy Carter is the founder and CEO of Atom Factory, and for the past five years he has managed Lady Gaga through her ascent to global superstardom. Carter doesn’t live just in the music world; his many tech projects include co-founding the community platform Backplane and investing in a number of start-ups, often alongside Menlo Ventures’ Shervin Pishevar.

Carter and Gaga’s LittleMonsters.com gets as much at 60 percent of its traffic from mobile. They recently announced that her next album, which is due next spring, will be released as an interactive app.

And last but not least, as CEO of MLB Advanced Media, Bob Bowman gives people something they want — live streaming baseball — and gets them to pay real money for it. MLB.tv now has 3.7 million total subscribers and delivers 1.1 million live video streams per day.

The outspoken Bowman has been a pioneer in jumping into mobile headfirst, with the AtBat app available on nearly every flavor of smartphone and tablet.

Bowman’s appearance will be well timed, not only because MLB is an early adopter of the iOS 6 Passbook feature, but also as it will be right in the middle of the World Series when he speaks at our conference.

If you’d like to join us and Stanton, Carter and Bowman at Dive Into Mobile, grab one of the remaining tickets before it’s too late.

Another possibility: Over time, Apple simply builds an Apple TV set right in front of us, in bits and pieces — so slowly that we don’t really notice it.

Take the remote, for instance. PatentlyApple has its hands on an Apple application for an “advanced TV remote” that would offer some cool features. Like the ability to automatically scan your other devices and figure out the right code to control them, instead of requiring users to use a combination of manuals and trial and error.

At least as important is that, while Apple’s patent, filed back in 2010, could be a standalone device, the application makes it seem much more likely that users will use their iPhones, iPods or iPads to control their TVs.

Which makes sense, because Apple is already offering a “Remote” iOS app that handles some basic functions for its existing Apple TV. That is: There’s a good chance you’re just a download away from owning a bona-fide Apple TV remote already.

This kind of incremental building may be even more important on the content side, which is the real key to an Apple TV: If it’s simply a very nice screen that offers the same content choices that TV viewers already have, then it’s just a very nice screen. And for years, Apple has been making attempts to wrangle different TV choices, at different price points, without much success.

But instead of one grand, sweeping video package, Apple may end up just cobbling together an array of offerings, piece by piece.

To wit: The latest refresh of Apple TV didn’t offer any new content, but it did make it easier for Apple users to buy the content that’s already there. Anyone with an iTunes account can subscribe to Netflix, and soon, Major League Baseball’s MLB.TV service, directly from Apple, without having to pull out a credit card again.

Netflix + iTunes + baseball games won’t make up a full suite of programming choices for most people. But now that Reed Hastings and Bob Bowman have agreed to let Tim Cook handle their billing for them, more media moguls will likely follow in their footsteps. Get enough of them in there, and you could end up with something really compelling.

There are 72,000 paid apps in Google’s store, compared to Apple’s 211,000. But more important is the number of apps the stores are actually selling, and that’s where analytics firm Distimo weighs in. It says that when it comes to big hits, Google’s store is much further behind.

The most telling data point: Distimo says only two paid apps have been downloaded more than 500,000 times worldwide since Google’s market opened in early 2009. But it says six paid apps in Apple iPhone’s app store did similar volume in March and April–in the U.S. alone.

As Fortune.com’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt notes, this report is from the same people who riled Apple fans last month with a study that said Android was set to catch Apple in the sheer number of apps available. So perhaps next month they’ll come out with a study that makes Android boosters happy again.

But Distimo’s newest report does seem to sync up with comments we’ve heard from developers in the past: They’re interested in distributing their stuff via Android, but they’re not sure they’ll be able to sell it there.

Here’s the way MLB.com chief Bob Bowman put it in an April interview: “The Android user typically is less likely to buy, and therefore the ROI on developing for Android is different than it is for Apple….The iPhone and iPad user is interested in buying content-–that’s one of the reasons they bought the device. The Android buyer is different.”

[Image credit: drinksmachine]

MLB.com boasts one of the most successful subscription businesses in digital media; last year, the company reported 1.5 million subscribers, and expects that number to hit 2 million this year. So it’s worth listening to Bowman’s take on Apple vs. Android, his company’s recent Facebook experiment, and why mobile advertising is taking off.

Peter Kafka: You’ve complained publicly before about the difficulty in supporting multiple flavors of Android for your apps. But this year you’ve expanded the number of Android handsets you’re supporting from 6 to 11. Did you ever consider not working with Android at all?

Bob Bowman The short answer is no. But what we have done is that we don’t support every Android phone. Because at some point, it’s diminishing returns. The Android user typically is less likely to buy, and therefore the ROI on developing for Android is different than it is for Apple.

Why do you think an Android owner behaves differently than an iPhone owner?

The iPhone and iPad user is interested in buying content–that’s one of the reasons they bought the device. The Android buyer is different.

It’s a great phone–make no mistake about it. But if you really want first rate digital content on a device, your first look will probably be an iPhone. And on the tablet, an iPad.

Do you think you’ll be supporting either the BlackBerry Playbook or HP’s WebOS?

We want them to succeed. We don’t want there to be just one company out there. Obviously there are a lot of customers out there that still use the BlackBerry. So if there’s a tablet out there that they are more comfortable with, vs. the iPad, Hallelujah.

I think we will support the Playbook for sure this season. Blackberry’s been a partner of ours for a long time.

Last month you started streaming spring training games, for free, on Facebook. Did that generate any new business for you, and will you keep doing it?

As a conversion tool, it was de minimus. But that didn’t bother us, because we were using it as a promotional vehicle, to get people excited about baseball. And to see how many people would take time out and watch it. We had tens of thousands each day doing it.

[But] we’re not going to do the embeddable player for the regular season. What we found was during the past few weeks, as many people clicked the link (back to the MLB.com site) as clicked the embeddable player.

One might think that the embeddable player would get a lot more clicks. But a lot of people are so used to seeing video on a full screen, with full features, that they ended up back here.

You sell subscriptions internationally, and YouTube has been working on its own international sports deals. Is there a way to work with them?

We’re big fans of Google. And Claude Ruibal, who’s over there at YouTube and YouTube Sports, we’re big fans of his, too. So we’ve initiated some conversations with them. As yet, unfruitful. But in the end, people do deals, not companies, so we’ll see how it goes.

You’re primarily in the subscription business, but you sell ads, too. How’s that going?

Good. We’ll get 15 to 20 percent of our revenue from sponsorships this year. The most pleasant surprise for 2011 is wireless sponsorship. With all the eyeballs going to mobile–45, 50 percent of our eyeballs will be mobile this year–you have to execute advertising. Otherwise all you’ve done is trade a dollar for 70 cents.

Where does the 30 cents go?

Because with wireless subscription products, you’re losing 30 percent margin to Apple.

Ah. So you’re selling via Apple’s new in-app subscription rules. But you’ve decided you can live with them?

We’ve been living by them since March 1st. We don’t view them as a dramatic change from where they’ve been in the past. We’re hopeful that over time, the margin will fall from 30 percent, but we don’t know if it will.

But make no mistake about it, Apple’s been a great partner. Last I checked, they created the iPhone and the iPad.

Still think Facebook can’t be a big player in Web video?

You can watch the game, a pre-season matchup between the Dodgers and the Rangers, right now, for free, via Major League Baseball’s page, for a little while longer — it’s in the bottom of the 8th as I’m publishing this. The game isn’t a nail-biter — again, it’s a pre-season game — and you can’t expand the video beyond the smallish box in the newsfeed.

If you click on the image, you’ll be directed off-site, where you can sign up for a (free) account and watch the game on a full screen. And maybe you’ll end up liking it so much you’ll end spending up to $120 for a season-long subscription to MLB.TV’s digital video package.

Which is really the point of this experiment, says Bob Bowman, CEO of MLB.com, pro baseball’s digital operation. Bowman says the free games on Facebook, which began yesterday and will run until opening day at the end of month, are merely supposed to test Facebook’s promotional power. (The folks behind Ultimate Fighting Championship have been trying the same thing, by showing some of their preliminary matches for free and trying to upsell viewers on a pay-per-view buy offsite).

It’s possible that the league will keep running a single free game a day on Facebook during the regular season, too. MLB.com has tried that in the past on mobile phones, and will be doing it on its own Website this year as well.

But Bownman says there aren’t plans to give MLB.TV subscribers full access to games via Facebook, and doesn’t plan on selling individual games on the site, either.

“What we’re trying to do is figure out who these fans are, whether they like it, and whether they share it,” he says.

So in case you were planning on panic-selling some shares tomorrow: This move doesn’t threaten any established distribution business any more than Facebook’s one-off movie rental threatens Netflix. For now.

Still, just because Bowman and company are starting with a toe-touch doesn’t mean they couldn’t take a deeper plunge later on. And live sports seems like something that lends itself quite nicely to Facebook’s platform — much more so, really, than watching movies like “The Dark Knight”.

And unlike the “The Dark Knight” experiment, there’s no e-commerce angle here for Facebook. Users don’t need to use Facebook Credits to watch the game, and if MLB.com generates some subscriptions, Facebook won’t get a lead-gen fee.

But again, it’s easy to imagine ways that Facebook could participate in this if they wanted to elbow their way in.

For now, though, the site seems content to let developers like Warner Bros, and MLB.com experiment with interesting ways to deliver video — and potentially, all sorts of entertainment — via their platform. Smart. And worth watching.

Bob Bowman, CEO of Major League Baseball Advanced Media–pro baseball’s standalone digital media company–tells me iPhone and iPod touch users will soon be able to buy individual games. The feature will be added to the company’s existing MLB.com app and will roll out as soon as Apple (AAPL) finishes approving the update, which Bowman expects to happen within the next few days.

As far as I know, that will make baseball the first pro sports league to sell mobile access to live games on an on-demand, a la carte basis.

The current version of the MLB.com app, which sells for $9.99, gives users the ability to watch a couple of live games each day, but MLB.com selects the games. And those who own both the app and subscribe to baseball’s MLB.TV–an all-you-can eat subscription service–can stream any live game they want to their phones. iPhone and iPod touch users have bought about 250,000 downloads of the app.

Bowman, not surprisingly, says he’d prefer to sell the app-plus-Web subscription together, but says he’s offering the games a la carte as an experiment to gauge demand. The test will run through the rest of the regular season, which ends Oct. 4.

News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Time Warner’s (TWX) Turner, the two networks that own the rights to the baseball playoffs and World Series, have a Web blackout for the TV broadcasts of those games. (Bowman says he is working with both networks to offer a compromise to iPhone app users–a “four screen” version with live, stationary feeds of the game–so that, for instance, you may be able to see the dugout, etc. Pricing, if any, still undetermined.)

There is one other restriction to the offer, and it’s the same one that exists with the Web subscription service: You can’t watch games that are broadcast in your home market. That is, I can watch the Minnesota Twins play on an iPhone if I’m in Brooklyn, but not in Minneapolis.

If you ask the sports leagues why they can do it, many say it’s because of their product. There is such an abundance of sporting events that all of them can’t be broadcast on television. But somewhere, someone usually wants to watch those events.

Prices vary–the National Hockey League sells access for $159, while $19.95 gets you a season pass to Major League Soccer’s MLSLive.tv.

Earlier this decade, before YouTube became a household name, skeptics doubted that streaming sports would work. “People at the time said no one will watch video online. Even if they will, they will never pay you for it,” says Bob Bowman, chief executive of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, which operates MLB.tv.

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