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Major League Baseball’s digital arm, MLB Advanced Media, wants you watching more than just baseball. And it’s raising a bunch of money to make that happen.
The company, which already streams a lot more than just baseball — NHL games, Super Bowls and even HBO Now — is in talks with other media orgs and finance folks about raising money to bid on more sports rights and sell the streaming technology it has to other parties.
That’s according to Bob Bowman, President and CEO of MLB Advanced Media, who spoke Thursday at Re/code‘s annual Code/Media conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel in Dana Point, Calif. Bowman says that sports streaming still has a ways to go before it dethrones live sports on television, but that he thinks it’s the future.
“You just go where the people are,” Bowman explained. “If the consumers are on their mobile devices and that’s where they’re spending 90 percent of their connectivity on a mobile device, it’s not hard to figure out that’s where you gotta be.”
MLB’s media business is growing. Bowman said the company is doing between $1.2 billion and $1.3 billion in annual revenue, and between 75 percent and 80 percent of that business comes from selling baseball content. He wants the non-baseball revenue to jump to “billions and billions.”
“We’re not doing this to lay up,” he said.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
