MLB Streaming Origins
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Shaan tells the story of how MLB's streaming technology division became a multi-billion dollar company.
"Major League Baseball had created a tech team, basically a tech company inside of Major League Baseball co-owned by the teams. When Ichiro came over from Japan, they needed to stream the games because people in Japan wanted to listen to the games.
They built this streaming technology and started offering it, with each team using and co-funding it. But then they ended up spinning it out as a multibillion dollar company because they became the best at video streaming. Now if you want to watch Game of Thrones, it's MLB AM's video tech that streams it. When 10 million people click play as soon as the episode drops, the thing doesn't crash.
They started working on it in 2004 and had a 5-year head start on having the insight that this infrastructure would be important - even before Netflix. It ended up getting acquired by Disney and is now a huge part of ESPN streaming, ESPN+ and Disney+. It's crazy that one of the big tech unicorn companies came out of this baseball co-op funded thing."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.