“We are back in baseball,” said Peter Moore, president of EA Sports. “It’s been six years since we’ve had the licenses.”

For a while now, MLB has had a third-party exclusivity with EA’s competitor, Take-Two Interactive. While Take-Two still holds a grip on most games, MLB has turned to EA to make its Facebook game.

This may be an early indication that EA’s decision to fork out $275 million to acquire Playfish, one of the early entrants into the social-gaming space, was a step in the right direction.

Still, there are a whole lot of home runs EA must now hit.

World Series Superstars, which launched today in advance of Opening Day tomorrow, challenges players to build teams, manage clubs and compete in games against friends. The game follows three other branded sports titles: FIFA Superstars, Madden NFL Superstars and Sports PGA Golf Challenge. Like the other titles, World Series Superstars is free to play with the option of paying for virtual goods to advance the game further.

Beyond EA’s licensing deal with MLB, the roll-out of the game also hints at the increasing importance of branded games on Facebook.

To date, much of the industry has been focused on what is called original IP, which doesn’t rely on well-known names to spur adoption. Zynga, for instance, has been wildly successful with its own content, ranging from FarmVille to CityVille and Mafia Wars.

A lot of debate recently, however, has centered about whether brands will dominate as the industry matures.

It’s debatable as to whether Zynga or others have become brands themselves, much like Rovio’s Angry Birds on mobile, but EA’s approach has been to leverage the licenses it has and bring games to market on Facebook, such as Monopoly and other titles.

Before EA purchased the social game maker, Playfish had no branded titles.

“We are very focused on extending some of our key brands onto social platforms. We’ve invested a lot since the acquisition, and we are starting to see the fruits of the labors,” said C.J. Prober, Playfish’s VP of publishing and product management. “Playfish is still really new to EA and we have lots of access to great new brands. The mix of brands vs. original IP will be higher in the near term, but will even out over time.”

Prober argues brands are increasingly more important since Facebook started cracking down on how often a developer can post messages to a player’s wall to attract new users among their friend groups.

Facebook said there’s still a mix of both branded and original titles, but that it is starting to see a shift.

“We are seeing some acceleration on the growth of brands coming to the platform…We are moving from the younger, newer category of games to the branded players that have been established on other platforms,” said Katie Mitic, Facebook’s director of platform and mobile marketing.

In particular, she says branded sports games are among the most engaging and best monetizing games on the platform.

“As Facebook Platform matures, we’re seeing high quality games, such as FIFA Superstars and Madden NFL Superstars, emerge and reach a new audience of social game players who may not have typically played online games before,” she added.

For anyone, it’s a large audience to target.

Mitic said more than 200 million people play games on Facebook each month–translated into sports terms, that’s nearly twice the size of the entire audience of the last Super Bowl.

In addition, more than 10 million standalone Kinect games have been sold, the company said.

The Kinect allows players to use body motion to control the game, rather than the traditional controller.

While Microsoft calls the sales robust, it appears the pace is slowing.

In the lead up to the holidays, Microsoft sold eight million Kinect devices in the first 60 days. But in the following 60-day period, it sold only two million more.

Still, the 10 million-strong user base has the potential to breathe new life into the Xbox platform and broaden its audience beyond the hardcore gamers. Microsoft’s competition is no longer limited to Sony’s PlayStation or the Wii, but extends to Google TV and Apple TV.

According to Nielsen, game console owners are most likely to use the boxes first to play games and watch DVDs, but after that, entertainment services are a close third.

Video-on-demand and streaming services such as Netflix, MLB Network and ESPN3 account for 20 percent of Wii users’ time, 10 percent of Xbox 360 users’ time and 9 percent of PlayStation 3 users’ time.

Microsoft said starting this spring, consumers will be able to connect to Netflix and Hulu Plus using hand gestures and voice control. Also coming this year is Avatar Kinect, which was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. With Kinect, you can control your avatar’s movement and expressions, so when you smile, frown, nod or speak, your avatar will do the same.

Of course, new game titles will give users new excuses to buy the Kinect. On April 12, Ubisoft will launch Michael Jackson: The Experience, which features the artist’s songs with dance moves, and many other titles are coming.

Alas, you’ve got no choice but to remember that last part. It has disappeared from the Web, apparently at the behest of Major League Baseball.

Stewart dissected the media hubhub about Obama’s pitch–and in particular Fox News’s analysis of it–on his July 15 show. But if you watch the archived version of that show at Viacom’s (VIA) “Daily Show” Web site, you’ll find that the bit has been cut out of his opening monologue. It once ran for two minutes and 43 seconds, but now the archive stops short at the 55-second mark.

And if you try to watch that episode on Hulu, the Web site owned by News Corp. (NWS), GE’s (GE) NBC and Disney (DIS), you’ll find that it’s gone altogether, replaced by a message blaming “rights issues” (click image to enlarge):

What happened? The story, via Viacom officials, is that pro baseball officials contacted them this week and told them to take down the Obama footage, which it owns.

The argument, I’m told, is that the MLB was fine with Stewart (and every other TV show in the country) using the clip under “fair use” terms–the footage itself was a news story, and Stewart was adding value via his commentary, etc. But it balked at the notion of the footage remaining in Viacom’s archives, and circulating on the Web, forever.

None of that makes any sense, of course: There’s no reason that Stewart’s use of the clip should be okay, but only for a limited time. And if Viacom wanted to spend time fighting MLB on this, it certainly could have.

But presumably, the company figures it wants to use its legal resources elsewhere–like fighting the never-ending copyright lawsuit it filed against Google (GOOG) and YouTube. Remember that one?

In any case, I’ve reached out to MLB to make sure I’m not missing anything here. And of course, you can still find all sorts of footage of the pitch, along with other anchors making fun of it, all over the Web. Like this one:

Here’s an edited version of the beginning of the July 15 episode of the “Daily Show.” Before you click on it, note the title of the clip, and it’s original running time.

I’m told that an edited version of the show will show up on Hulu again later tonight or on Thursday.

Absent from the new Sirius app are a number of the broadcaster’s more popular channels, among them Howard Stern’s, which Sirius often claims are responsible for driving more subscriptions than any other. Also missing: MLB Play-by-Play, NFL Play-by-Play and Sirius NASCAR Radio.

That the company calls this app “Sirius XM Premium Online” when it fails to include much of the broadcaster’s more popular content is ironic. That it expects subscribers to pay an additional $2.99/month to access it after a week-long free trial is silly (Note: If you are already a Sirius XM Internet subscriber or subscribe to the company’s Premium Online service, Sirius waives that fee). Without Stern and those other channels, there’s really no reason to. There are far too many other ways to listen free music on the iPhone that don’t require a monthly subscription fee–Pandora, for example. Or Last.fm. And NormSoft’s Pocket Tunes app has been streaming Stern for months now.

Surely, Sirius knows this. So why not include Stern et al? Did a rights issue prevent Sirius from doing so? Did it convince itself that Jimmy Buffett’s Radio Margaritaville and Oprah Radio were compelling enough reasons to download the app? Or perhaps the company is planning a standalone Stern app for which it will charge separately. Or maybe Stern is working on that himself.

And seriously, doesn’t Sirius XM pay Stern too much not to include him?

In any event, the app is an enormous disappointment. Which is too bad. Because Sirius really could have used the few additional subscribers Sirius XM Premium Online might have attracted. With the souring economy weighing heavily on the auto industry–-a mainstay of Sirius’s business–-and partner Chrysler navigating bankruptcy, the struggling company is bracing itself for nasty subscriber losses this year.

If this is all that Sirius XM has to offer on the iPhone, it would have been wiser to do what Netflix (NFLX) did with its Watch It Now online streaming service–provide it gratis to active subscribers as a loyalty bonus. Without Sirius XM’s top-tier content, there’s little to differentiate its iPhone app from Pandora and Last.fm. And Pandora and Last.fm are free.

UPDATE: A quick review of the Sirius Internet Radio FAQ reveals that it is indeed licensing restrictions that prevent Sirius XM from offering NFL, MLB and NASCAR via the Internet and presumably via the iPhone as well. Those same restrictions, however, do not seem to apply to Howard Stern’s channels, which all appear in the Sirius Internet Radio lineup.

UPDATE: Sirius XM has declined comment on the Stern issue beyond what was already said in this morning’s press release.