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Major League Baseball to Stream ESPN Events

Major League Baseball’s Internet unit is moving farther away from its roots on the diamond. It plans to announce on Monday that it has struck a deal to take over the job of streaming live events online for ESPN.

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.

ESPN, a division of the Walt Disney Company, will begin using the technology services of the unit in April, when it will also change the name of its Web video hub from ESPN360.com to ESPN3.com.

ESPN had previously used the services of Move Networks, based in American Fork, Utah. But Move’s system required that customers download a special video player, said John Kosner, senior vice president of ESPN Digital Media. The network wanted to make its site easier to use by moving to a supplier that used Adobe’s popular Flash software, which operates within the Web browser.

“Baseball does a terrific job in terms of online video and distribution of their games,” Mr. Kosner said. “They really are the best in class for sport.”

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Sergio Ramos of Spain goes against Patrice Evra of France. World Cup games will be among the events streamed.Credit...Horacio Villalobos/European Pressphoto Agency

The advanced media unit, an independent company based in New York that has 400 employees, is jointly owned by the 30 professional baseball clubs and Major League Baseball. In addition to the 3,000 baseball games it broadcasts online each season, the company has been slowly branching out into other sports, handling events like the online broadcast for CBS’s March Madness college basketball tournament.

Winning the contract to handle ESPN’s online video business further diversifies the company, and raises the possibility that its owners will one day seek to sell a portion of it to other investors and perhaps change its name, to further distance it from baseball and make its services more appealing to other professional sports leagues.

In the United States, ESPN has deals with Internet service providers to make its online video available to their subscribers. Some of its content is available on a subscription basis outside the country.

Bob Bowman, chief executive of the advanced media unit, said the two companies might consider cross-promoting or bundling their offerings. For example, they could allow a customer who pays to watch New York Yankees games online to also watch World Cup soccer games or Grand Slam tennis matches, at a discount.

Mr. Bowman is pessimistic about the long-term prospects for Web sites like Hulu that aggregate content from different networks. But he said that a behind-the-scenes technology provider that handles live events for different companies can take advantage of the benefits of such combinations, while allowing each company to maintain an independent corporate identity.

“It gives our subscribers a wider array of things to watch, all without hurting the branding,” he said.

A correction was made on 
March 12, 2010

An article on Monday about ESPN’s choice of the Internet arm of Major League Baseball to handle its streaming video described incorrectly the technology used by Move Networks, which had been providing that service. It uses its own technology, which is compatible with several online video formats; it does not use Microsoft’s Silverlight format.

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