When it comes to modern media, Major League Baseball is the dinosaur (sometimes literally) of major North American sports. Aside from a relatively weak YouTube presence (250,000 subscribers, compared to the NBA’s 5.5 million), their podcast game is pretty much non-existent. Hence, the rise of independent, team-related podcasts which have grown in popularity while MLB stumbles its way through the 21st century.
This morning, many of those podcasts disappeared from iTunes, which appeared to be, according to various tweets, a result of the league cracking down on “unauthorized usage of a team name”. Ted Price, host of “Rangers Podcast in Arlington”, explained to Awful Announcing the history of his show, and how harmless — if not helpful — it is for MLB:
Hi there – I started the show in 2008 – back when the Rangers weren’t very good and finding intelligent conversation about the team was hard to come by – and have done 73 shows. I’ve had players, announcers, beat writers etc on the show from time to time. But mostly it’s a roundtable discussion with other fans. Never had amy complaints or red flags for inappropriate content, and I had support from many inside the Ranger organization.I make no money from these shows. It’s a cliche, but it really is a labor of love to have a chance to get together with other fans and talk about our favorite teams. We were critical at times, but no more than your typical sports-talk show. If anything it’s free advertising for the team and the MLB brand.I know there are other places I can use to get my show out to the public, but 90-95% of my downloads come form iTunes. I average 10-15,000 downloads an episode.
At least someone in the MLB offices can read a blog, or at least scroll through a Twitter feed, because MLB Advanced Media (“Advanced”…heh) quickly released a statement about the removal of the shows, and placed all the blame on Apple:
As we have done in the past, yesterday we notified Apple about certain podcasts on the iTunes Store whose titles and/or thumbnails include infringing uses of trademarks of Major League Baseball and certain Clubs. And, as we have done in the past, we asked Apple to have these trademarks removed from the podcast titles and thumbnails. Although we did not ask for or seek to have any podcast removed from the Store, it has come to our attention that Apple removed them. Given our many years of experience in notifying Apple about trademark issues on the Store, we trust that removing the podcasts was an oversight, and ask that you please look into this matter as soon as possible.Thank you for your cooperation.
Regardless of who is responsible — MLB for forcing the removal, or Apple misinterpreting MLB’s request — the podcasts aren’t doing any harm to the league’s brand, and removing them is not a good look for MLB. Unless, of course, MLB thinks people talking about its product is a bad thing.
