In what could be a monumental shift in the way users consume sports media online, as well as in the way producers and publishers strike deals to deliver the goods, the Advance Media arm of Major League Baseball will begin streaming content provided by non-other than the Mother Ship herself, ESPN.

From the New York Times:

The unit, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, or MLBAM, will handle the technology infrastructure and customer support for the nearly 3,500 live events that ESPN streams each year, including N.B.A. games, World Cup soccer matches, Grand Slam tennis tournaments and college football games.

The announcement is expected to be done today  (no press releases have been issued yet), so details of the deal are limited. According to the NY Times story, ESPN will rebrand it’s unnecessarily restrictive ESPN360.com portal to ESPN3.com (as in the third channel, get it?).

The deal breaks the mold in the way media producers had been publishing content online and it highlights a trend towards the creators of the content becoming their own delivery vehicles (think ABC.com, CBS, Hulu aka NBC) or striking deals with portals such as YouTube, and in this case, MLBAM.

What’s groundbreaking about this deal, however, is the fact that MLB will now become a content delivery platform for other sporting events, potentially dealing a one-two punch to Cable and Satellite. By theoretically wrestling away ESPN360 (which relied on the internet service providers to buy access from ESPN so they could then deliver it to their customers, but we don’t know if ESPN360 is gone altogether see update below, nothing changes on that front), and by migrating more users to the web for a ritual that is intrinsically linked to couches and TVs.

An interesting side story to keep an eye on as more details become available is whether MLB plans to offer some or all of this new ESPN content through its At Bat iPhone/iTouch app. Those of you paying attention would know that MLBAM uses Adobe’s Flash technology for delivering games on desktop web browsers, but has a decent app in the iTunes store that was actually one of the ones featured during the iPad announcement a few weeks ago. Apple doesn’t support Flash on its mobile devices, but MLB.TV will work on the iPad.

This new relationship between ESPN and MLB also underscores the need to put in place rules and regulations that preserve the neutral aspect of access to the internet so that Big Cable doesn’t jack up the price with the tired-excuse of bandwidth limits. Yes kids, this is why we need net neutrality.

Updated with blurb on Apple and MLB’s app.

Update 2: Here are the details, fresh from the press release:

Programming on ESPN3.com will remain the same, with access to replay, HD-quality streaming and milestone markers for select events, geo-targeted ads and more.  The network is available at no cost to fans who receive their high-speed Internet connection from an affiliated service provider.  It is currently in 50 million households — a majority of U.S. broadband homes — and accessible via dozens of Internet Service Providers nationwide, including AT&T, Verizon, Cox Communications, Comcast, RCN, Insight, Frontier, Cavalier, Charter, Mediacom, Conway, Grande Communications and more.

Today Justin Upton got a six-year $50M contract from the Diamondbacks, and it was well-deserved. Upton seems poised for greatness, and Arizona did the right thing locking him up.

Landing the big bucks hasn’t been so easy for Justin’s brother, Rays center fielder BJ Upton.

BJ was drafted by the Rays in 2002 and signed a $4.6M bonus. He made his major league debut in 2004, playing in 45 games.

In 2007, he blossomed, hitting .300-24-82 with 22 steals. A lot of teams would have responded to a season like that by offering their talented young outfielder a multiyear deal. That’s what the Dbacks did with Justin.

Instead, the Rays decided to reduce BJ’s salary, paying him $10,000 less in 2008. If that’s not a slap in the face, I don’t know what is.

This offseason, the Rays took BJ to arbitration over $300,000 and won. BJ will make $3M.

Don’t get me wrong, BJ doesn’t deserve your pity. He’s making millions of dollars to play a game. Moreover, he’s been hounded by allegations that he doesn’t always hustle.

But it’s interesting how one talented brother is being shown the money while the other has been nickled and dimed.

The announcement yesterday that Sling Media’s player for the iPhone would be allowed to stream television content via AT&T’s 3G cellular network, comes as a somewhat ho-hum conclusion to the soap opera that is MLB’s involvement in the new media arena.

Up until this point, AT&T had refused to allow third party apps access to its cellular data network for streaming audio or video. Anyone but Major League Baseball Advance Media that is. Now, thanks in part to the FCC, AT&T has relented.

From Wired’s Epicenter blog:

FCC pressure forced AT&T to allow VoIP onto the iPhone, and fear of similar pressure in the media streaming area could have affected its decision about Sling. (AT&T already allowed Major League Baseball to stream, as The New York Times points out, providing ammunition for Sling and consumer groups who complained to the FCC that AT&T’s refusal to support Sling was discriminatory.)

The about-face doesn’t really impact a whole lot of people. In order for you to stream games through your home TV service of choice, you have to own a Sling Player and the $30 iPhone app (a luxury in it’s own right), but arguably, the ability to by-pass MLB’s own iPhone app and still watch games on Apple’s money generator exists. Sure, AT&T’s crappy network means the quality of the audio and video will be much less than if you streamed through WiFi, but the same is true for MLB’s At Bat app.

Putting the conspiracy angle to rest, I’ve always thought this whole mess goes back to the infamous DirecTV-MLB Extra Innings exclusive deal since Echo Star, parent company of Dish Network, didn’t get a slice of MLB’s deal with Cable and DirecTV. Echo Star acquired Sling Media a few months afterward.

ESPN is reporting the Mariners have signed King Felix to a contract extension. Buster Olney says it’ll be “a five-year deal in the neighborhood of $80 million.”

Umpbump has learned some more contract details. Don’t ask us how. We could tell you, but then we’d have to kill you.

Felix will earn a total of $78 million over five seasons. But wait, there’s more! There are escalator clauses!

Add $1 million if he wins a Cy Young.
Add $500K if he comes in second in the Cy Young voting.
Add $250K if he finishes third.

All of which would be added to all remaining years on the contract.

You heard it here first, folks.

What ha happened...?

MLB.tv began its post-season broadcast with tonight’s one-game playoff between the Twins and Tigers and it featured the nifty multi-angle broadcast layout we saw during the all-star game.

The draw is in the ability for you to click on up to 10 different camera angles from across the stadium (or four simultaneously), and at first it seems like a cool way to watch the game. However, after a while, or after settling down in front of your laptop (some of us don’t have a TV hooked up), the whole thing turns the experience into a cumbersome mess.

Zoom zoom

Because you’re fixed on one camera angle, you’ll have to imagine what happens on the field when the ball is in play, if say you’re watching the center field camera (see top screen-grab). It doesn’t shift to a different angle that follows the action as you’ve been trained by a professionally-produced broadcast.

Also, you’ll have to endure the zoom adjustments done by the camera operator (remember, you’re stuck on his/her view), meaning you’ll get taken for quite a ride if you’re on the high home plate camera, which zooms in as the player hits a ball in play, and then back out once the play is dead.

Although the announcers could be heard on a few camera angles during the All-Star game, I actually heard both dudes during last night’s game on all angles, but I get the impression that sound is also fixed. Crowd noise is more pronounced, even causing the speakers to “pop” when it climbs above the 0 db level, which makes me think that you’re also locked into the camera’s microphone.

Again, I think it’s a cool way to watch the game for a few innings, and MLBAM itself is calling the service (dubbed Postseason.tv) as a “complementary” broadcast if you’ve got the game on your TV, but they should also offer users a choice for a single stream that emulates the main broadcast.

If you’re a regular subscriber to MLB.tv, you can simply login using your credentials. Otherwise you can pay $9.95 for the Postseason.tv online package.

IPhone or iPoud Touch users who have the At Bat application can also choose among the different camera angles, or watch four simultaneous feeds.

So I get home just in time to tune in to the first inning of the All-Star game (in progress) and since I don’t have a working TV, I log on to MLB.tv. To my surprise, the broadcast is not the same TV broadcast (as was the case for the Home Run Derby last night), but instead, is a direct feed from nine different camera angles around the new Busch Stadium. Freaking cool!

The video player is very similar to the MLB.tv player, and it gives you the option to watch anywhere from one camera to four simultaneously. Switching between them is as easy as clicking on the grid, then clicking on the new angle available as a list or placed geographically on a graphic of the ball park.

I was asked for my MLB.com account login info, not my MLB.tv, but in my case, they happen to be the same. Not sure if non-MLB.tv subscribers can watch it gratis, tho. Also, I hadn’t heard of this at all, I did some googling to try and figure when/if it had been announced, and the only thing I could find was a press release for a similar broadcast Fox Interactive did for the BCS.

And the best part? No broadcasters! Just pure unfiltered stadium ambience sounds. Beautiful! Darn. The first three camera angles (X-MO Low Home, High Homeplate, and Centerfield) do have the Fox broadcast audio.

(The main Fox online broadcast itself is blacked out, but is available through MLB.tv, as is Game Day audio).

I’m sorry, but I have to say this is freaking awesome. I take most of it back Bud, Robert, you too Donald, who’s a good new media goonie? who’s it, who’s it? yes you.

Has anyone noticed how much ESPN.com, especially their “MLB” page, sucks over the weekend? Maybe not, since the time when most people most obsessively check the internet is during the week, when they are at work and supposed to be doing other things.

But now that I am living in Japan, where due to timezone differences my weekend hardly overlaps with the US weekend, I really notice it. The front page hardly gets updated. Web gems don’t get posted at all. Don’t even think about new columns or blog posts. And breaking news stories and trades sometimes don’t get posted until as late as an hour or two after they are covered elsewhere.

All of which is in contrast to the workweek, when ESPN is pretty on top of things. Overall, the feeling is of a web enterprise that only has a couple people in the building on weekends.

In this day and age of the 24-hour news cycle, blogs, and viewers around the world, it really makes no sense for a website as prominent as ESPN.com to all but shut down over the weekend.

It’s cute and all when some sort of mega-news goes down over the weekend and a video gets posted wherein Buster Olney looks like he just got out of bed, but if a site like mlbtraderumors.com can afford to hire people to cover the weekends, ESPN should too.

Come hither...

When Apple announced the new iteration of it’s venerable cash cow, the iPhone 3GS, it did so emphasizing the speed of the device, capable of delivering faster web pages, loading applications in a snap, and, at least in the future, capable of utilizing AT&T’s faster mobile internet network.

Another feature that will no doubt take advantage of the upgraded horsepower will be streaming video, and because we know these MLB New Media Goons are ahead of the technology curve, Apple promptly partnered with MLB Advanced Media to showcase the live video delivery capabilities of the ubiquitous machine with its latest version of the MLB At Bat iPhone application.

And to complete this delicious new media menage a trois, AT&T gave MLBAM the exclusive right to stream live video via its 3G cellular network, a right previously denied to applications such as Skype and Slingplayer (remember them?).

This is where it gets hairy. It’s no secret that Apple’s extremely restrictive application approval process has been contradictory in giving the green light to certain kinds of applications while rejecting other, very similar ones. But now that AT&T is wanting to play VIP with MLBAM, it raises another set of questions.

AT&T denied Slingplayer access to its 3G network for video streaming saying it would clog up its 3G network, so why give the MLB New Media Goons the full spread?

From CNET:

But now AT&T is allowing MLB to do exactly what it would not allow Sling to do, which is stream live broadcast TV over its 3G cellular network onto iPhones. So what gives? Is AT&T playing favorites?

That’s exactly what Ben Scott, policy director for the advocacy group Free Press, thinks. The group issued a statement Thursday expressing its concern over what it sees as an inconsistent policy.

“We are troubled that carriers like AT&T are playing gatekeeper to the next generation of wireless Internet applications,” Scott said in a statement. “No Internet service provider should be allowed to pick winners and losers online.”

Two things: First, Net Neutrality

Up until this point, the Net Neutrality battle (remember kids, same Internet for all) was being fought on the Cable companies’ turf, in which Big Cable’s bandwidth cap threats could’ve impacted MLB’s own broadband hog, MLB.tv, but AT&T’s contradictory policy towards the MLB At Bat application seems to indicate that it will also have to be addressed on the mobile web.

(An interesting side note, MLB Advanced Media has been a busy little new media whore. Just a few days ago, Boxee, the media center that allows you to hook up your computer to your HDTV and watch TV shows and movies, announced that the alpha version of its software will give MLB.tv subscribers a way to watch games through Boxee on their TVs.)

Second (and here’s my conspiracy angle)

It’s quite curious to note that the kid not invited to the party is Sling Media, the maker of the Slingplayer application for the iPhone.  If you all remember, MLB has once before targeted Sling, which allows you to setup a box at home, and stream your cable or satellite service (or your shiny new public digital TV signal) over the internet to your laptop or mobile phone. Yes, you can stream your Sling connection to your iPhone, but it has to be done through a Wi-Fi connection (which necessitates a hot spot and not AT&T’s much wider 3G network).

Of course, MLB is not getting the double dip in broadcast rights once you stream the home team’s game when you’re away from home. And so you see, in my humble opinion at least, Bud Selig and his New Media Goons are getting AT&T to give them the 3G buffet while at the same time, Mamma Bell kicks Sling Media to the curve.

Full circle

Remember who bought Sling Media? Echo Star, the parent company for Dish Network, which never got a piece of the MLB Extra Innings pie.

Conclusion?

Clearly MLB Advanced Media is spreading its tentacles to as many areas of technology as it can. That is a good thing. But there seem to be some shady shenanigans going on behind the scenes. And what I don’t like is the fact that we have to keep paying an arm and a leg just to watch some baseball.