Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Play Ball! Free MLB Streams On Twitter, Facebook (And AllThingsD).

MLB Advanced Media, pro baseball’s digital arm, continues to find interesting ways to promote its popular subscription service. Here’s the latest: Free streaming across Facebook, Twitter and the Web. Even here!

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.

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Nothing wrong with MySpace price. Just our totally screwing up every way. Agree Facebook revenues will zoom, but still Apple cheap.

— Rupert Murdoch, via Twitter