If you've been watching the playoffs this season, there are two marketing appeals you are sure to be intimately familiar with at this point. One is that Frank Caliendo is the funniest human being that's ever lived. Having caught an episode of Caliendo's show last year, I know that's a disingenious claim made all the worse by the frequency with which it's proffered.
The other is that the iPhone and baseball go together like peanut butter and jelly, unless you're a Pirate fan who has to watch Ryan Braun beat your team over and over. You don't have to be a Bucco partisan, though, to find some problems with the ad's game changing promises.
When the iPhone's baseball application was first announced it was promoted as offering live gamecasts, highlights moments after they happen and everything else the baseball fan on the go needed to follow their team. As Eamonn Brennan reports, though, things aren't quite what they're cracked up to be. There's no gamecast and no detailed box score, two things offered by other applications that don't cost the user a dime.
MLB is missing out on a huge opportunity here. If they can work some sort of live gamecast mode into their application, and combine it with streaming video, they could have a game-changing technology on their hands. Instead, their application is mediocre and provides essentially the same function as any baseball web page, which I would visit for free if I didn't already pay $5 for this crappy application.
The highlight videos still look mighty purdy, though.
UPDATED: A brief conversation with Mr. Brennan, spurred by the comments below, bear out that he did not download the update offered by MLB. A thousand floggings for him and my apologies to MLB and Apple for comparing them to Frank Caliendo.
