Streaming Media Steps Up to the Plate
Major League Baseball's Internet Ambitions
By Jennie Rose
Give $90 million over four years to build and maintain a Web site, appeal to baseball fans fanatical enough to use their mobile phones to check scores, then charge for Webcasts of the games, and how could you lose? In the summer of 2000, Major League Baseball had this plan in mind when club owners voted to centralize all Major League Internet operations under the umbrella of an official league site at MLB.com.
Each of Major League Baseball's teams are contributing $1 million per year to MLB's Advanced Media (MLBAM) group, which maintains the MLB.com site and infrastructure. According to spokesman Jim Gallagher, the site has funding commitments from all the teams that extend for a four-year period.
Unveiled on April 1, 2001 after a five-month-long development process, the relaunched MLB.com site gives visitors access to stats, summaries, and even pitch-by-pitch re-enactments of games. (
Figure 1 shows MLB's official site.) Perhaps the most interesting site feature, though, is a video-on-demand system that lets consumers not only watch their favorite games online, but also create custom clips and instant replays. Instead of sticking with a revenue model that relies on advertising, as other sports sites and video providers have done, MLBAM decided to put together a subscription-based service for the video-on-demand features.
Incentive
Site traffic analysis always showed that visitors to MLB.com were loyal, but whether those visitors could be converted into paying customers was a matter of incentive. Fortunately for MLBAM, fans already flocked to the site for the existing content, and it was a good bet that the free Daily Cuts video service would create demand for more video streams. What's more, many visitors seemed willing to pay at least $2.95 for a two-day "rental" of what MLBAM refers to as Baseball's Best Games. For the first time, fans would have easy access to classic games like the 1952 World Series.
Nearly three months after the launch, MLBAM was confident enough in the popularity of its streaming video that it released a new product for the site. The Custom Cuts video service lets subscribers create their own videos of instant replays for $24.95. To help gain more subscriptions, MLBAM packages live game broadcasts together with the Custom Cuts service. Together, the Daily Cuts, Baseball's Best Games, and Custom Cuts products form one of the strongest video-on-demand services available.
Strategic Partners
It's no secret that streaming media is the method of choice for serving video across the Internet. Unfortunately, streaming media is known for its vulnerability to technical glitches and service outages that can infuriate paying customers. Companies looking to bring streaming media to the masses face a major business risk if they can't deliver quality. To improve the odds of success, MLBAM decided to outsource the video encoding and distribution to several technology partners.
Before it could sell video-on-demand, MLBAM knew it needed to acquire the video, encode it into a popular streaming media format, index the content so it could be searched, and then upload everything to a location where it could be distributed to end users. Joe Choti, CTO of MLBAM, notes that the goal was to avoid reinventing the wheel. A project of this scope requires a large infrastructure investment—something that not every content provider should deploy in house. For MLBAM, the infrastructure needs were costly enough to justify outsourcing.
"Streaming in our case could be very expensive," says Choti. "Think about a game that's three to four hours in duration. Think about the cost to encode those three hours, the equipment and cost of digitally encoding it. Think about the cost of storing three hours of that stream permanently in your data warehouse. Think about the pipes you would need to push that high a volume of bits out of your infrastructure, and think of the multiple points of presence required. All of these are significant dollar investments."
MLBAM eventually chose RealNetworks for the streaming video format, and Virage for the acquisition, encoding, and indexing of all video. For content distribution, MLBAM relies on Real Broadcast Network for the Custom Cuts product, and on Akamai for all other media. Choti could not comment any further on the selection process, including the details behind the three-year RealNetworks deal. He admitted that there were other contenders, but "for business reasons, we chose Real." (Real founder and CEO Rob Glaser is part owner of the Seattle Mariners, but there was no comment on whether that had any effect on the deal.) The total cost to MLBAM over the three year term of this agreement is $20 million, and consists of RBN hosting services, advances against revenue sharing, and cash payments for branding and promotion.
User Experience
Choti emphasizes that user profiling was a major factor in MLBAM's development approach. When deciding how best to serve video to customers, Choti and his team considered the fact that most of the MLB.com target audience does not have broadband-enabled Internet connections.
According to a 2001 study by IDC, an increasing number of households are investing in faster modems and high-speed Internet connections, with 51.2 percent of online users reporting that their modems achieve speeds of 56Kbps or faster. 18.8 percent of online households subscribe to a high-speed Internet access service, compared with 11.7 percent a year ago.
But a 7.1 percent broadband growth rate is simply not fast enough to ignore the lower speed connections. With this in mind, MLBAM configured most of MLB.com's video so that it could be viewed at a low bit rate over a dial-up connection. Serving streaming media for a baseline connection speed of 56Kbps, MLBAM uses fairly heavy compression on its video. The site uses multiple compression rates depending on the product. In the case of Custom Cuts, MLBAM encodes two streams—one designed for dialup (56Kbps) users, and one for broadband (300Kbps) users.
"The quality of the video is not compromised when levied against the people that you would shut out if you didn't compress it heavily," explains Choti. "You have to say that most users today have 56Kbps modems or higher, so let's baseline at 56Kbps and see if we can push it out. Those products that we can't compress become broadband projects, and we just let the fans know that we understand they don't have broadband, but there's no other way to deliver the product." The Baseball's Best Games product, for example, is only available in a 300Kbps broadband version.
Custom Development
When it came to adding e-commerce functionality to the site, MLBAM decided against using a third party provider, opting instead for its own modular subscription architecture. MLBAM developed its authentication scheme to protect the content, utilizing user account level securityto control access to keypages and servlets for Custom Cuts.
Justin Shaffer is the lead developer on Custom Cuts. He says most of the technology behind the e-commerce on MLB.com adheres to open standards, and is based on a J2EE-compliant application server.
"Users log in to the servers. Behind that we have lightweight directory access protocol, and Oracle." He adds, "The subscription process is straightforward. We track users based on sessions to verify whether someone is logged in. There's some built-in handling for that within iPlanet, and all of our development is [in the form of] JSP pages."
For the most part, media products on the site have been implemented through MLBAM's partnership with RealNetworks, and the help of the Real Broadcast Network. However, due to the video source (Virage), the need for timely delivery to the Web, and the need for stats synchronization, Custom Cuts was implemented from a significantly more complex model.
MLBAM had four and sometimes five developers working non-stop on Custom Cuts for almost three months. Additional staff members helped with the architecture and infrastructure planning. Organizing the logistics for video acquisition, which takes place via satellite, took several months as well. All told, from the initial architectural discussions to the launch on MLB.com, Custom Cuts was in development for about six months.
Choti's don't-reinvent-the-wheel approach to development came into play when the staff decided to drive Custom Cuts off the data architecture of MLB.com's audio product, Gameday. Gameday streams live audio broadcasts of all games throughout the season. The Gameday production process connects the stringers—laptop-equipped employees at the games who enter into a custom application information about each play as it occurs—with MLB.com's stats database.
Beyond this data architecture, however, Custom Cuts proved to be a completely different animal from Gameday. CustomCuts significantly changed the way that MLB.com interprets live event data from the ballparks. Other professional sports, such as hockey, basketball, and football, have a clock running throughout the game. This creates a somewhat official time against which events can be synchronized. In the case of baseball, there's no clock running, which makes the task of producing automated video with synchronized pitches much more complex. MLBAM made significant changes to thedata model for the incoming stringer data to account for time stamps.
MLBAM knew also that it had to obtain the realtime information to work with Virage. The Virage indexing process is a multipass system that uses MLB.com's live event data feed, Virage's proprietary video scrubbing technology, and final scrubbing and sign-off by video editors. On the front end, MLBAM's custom-built technology handles the user experience from subscription, through the search, to the construction of the Custom Cuts reel, to the viewing of the user's video selection.
The usual Real Broadcast Network model uses static SMIL documents to synchronize sound, video, and other data. But in the case of Custom Cuts, the team needed mechanisms to distribute real time event data to Virage—a complicated proposition. The team built a Web-based XML interface on the Virage side to retrieve the clip metadata, and relied on dynamic SQL generation on the MLB.com side to accommodate the multitude of search possibilities. Finally, team members generated dynamic SMIL documents based on users' Custom Cuts reel selections.
Infrastructure
No amount of synchronization and metadata can save a business, though, if performance issues make the site appear broken to customers. To mitigate those familiar server load issues caused by streaming video on the Internet, MLBAM relies on a content distribution model called edge caching.
In this context, edge caching is the use of strategically located servers to distribute the load of streaming video across the Internet. This relieves the pressure on individual network segments and streaming servers. In the traditional server-side delivery model, when the user requests objects,Web and application servers process the request, and the objects are sent from the server back to the end user's browser or client application.
The traditional server-side delivery model places a higher load on the servers, which typically results in a slower response to requests. With edge caching, objects are put ongeographically dispersed servers throughout the Internet and placed as close to the end user as possible.This method puts less stress on the hosted servers, reduces the need for larger pipes, and typically delivers the video much quicker than sending it across many Internet nodes.As fans request digital streams, the closest or fastest responding server (in this case, Akamai servers) responds to the request in a load balanced fashion. For Custom Cuts, MLB.com utilizes the Akamai FreeFlow product, which isdesigned to distributestreaming mediareliably and quickly to a large number of users, in as many locations.
A Grand Slam?
MLB.com's relaunch looks to be paying off. Non-subscriber traffic volume to the site has climbed. And according to Nielsen/NetRatings, more than 21 million office workers viewed streaming media on the Internet in September 2001—up 21 percent from September 2000.
It isn't all high-fives for the staff, though. By mid-June, a total of 83,000 subscribers had signed up for audio streams from MLB.com. While this may sound impressive, the number of viewers is not even the equivalent of two sold-out games in the major leagues. According to spokesman Jim Gallagher, MLBAM isn't worried by these figures. "We're predicting profitability in the middle of our second year," he says.
During one of the first games of the 2001 season, MLB.com stumbled when the site went down due to high traffic volume. Rather inauspiciously, it was just one week after MLB.com began charging for audio content. Getting hit with the worst-case scenario right off the bat may have been a boon, though. The response to the problem— the edge caching delivery model—could turn out to be a magic bullet that makes streaming media more viable in terms of image and performance quality.
Today, MLBAM's team looks back on the Custom Cuts project's development with little regret. Given the potential grief in a project of this scope, Choti says the problems were minimal. Partnering with Real Networks and Virage avoided "a lot of pain and heartache to MLB.com and its fans," he says. "To develop this completely in-house would probably have taken three times as long, [cost] ten times as much, and we would have had massive bumps along the way."
Naturally, in the aftermath of a launch and a long season, developers have compiled a list of ideas about how to improve Custom Cuts, particularly with regard to the assets. For example, Major League Baseball issomewhat unique in itsscalability requirements, says Shaffer. For this reason Shaffer believes MLBAM would definitely benefit from centralizing the data store for all video-related metadata. Baseball also has the unique requirement of moment-by-moment fluidity. "Due to the nature of baseball statistics, past rulings and decisions are constantly being changed, which currently forces both Virage data and MLB.com data to change." In the future, the MLBAM team plans to ensure that Custom Cuts is seamlessly updatable in real time.
MLBAM would be wrong to assume its problems are all in the past. But it does seem to have the most debilitating bugs worked out for the second revision of Custom Cuts, which is slated for next season. Currently, the development team is working on what Shaffer calls a "rock-solid" architecture that will support Custom Cuts for the coming years.
"We are definitely anticipating changes in streaming media and Web development technologies, but have the benefit of amostlyunchanging platform to base our products on," says Shaffer. Add to that the benefit of the fans, unchanging in their loyalty, and MLBAM is set to be the most complete baseball portal around.
Jennie Rose is a freelance technology writer and former Web developer. She welcomes your feedback at [email protected].
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