MLB Advanced Media

MLB Advanced Media is a subsidiary company of Major League Baseball created in 2000 to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the development of the internet. The company took over and expanded the existing mlb.com website and forced all teams to link their own websites to the leagues and also imposed a form of standardization to make these more responsive to the needs of fans and sportswriters. It also concentrated existing on-line streaming of radio broadcasts of live games on its website, making these available for all games through a paid subscription service. In 2002, televised streaming of games was added to the site, with the creation of MLB.TV.

From 2000 to 2017, the President and CEO of MLB Advanced Media was Bob Bowman, who played a leadership role in developing new technology through the company BAMTech (which stands for Baseball Advanced Media Technologies), such as the capacity to stream all live game in high-definition television format, available for replay on a wide variety of devices, but also the MLB At-Bat application for smartphones and Statcast, which provides advanced data regarding in-game events. Another technology developed by the company is the PITCHf/x strike zone system, under the leadership of Cory Schwartz. By proposing all of this through an accessible website, MLB Advanced Media was able to demonstrate that an active online presence could generate huge amounts of new revenues, that were then shared among all major league teams, helping to diminish some of the economic disparities caused by different market sizes.

In 2017, BAMTech was sold to the Walt Disney Company, who wanted to use the technologies developed for baseball in other fields of the entertainment industry.