Baseball and iPhone nerds rejoyce; MLB @ Bat 2010 uncorked
It's back. And kicking even more ass than last year.
Today Major League Baseball released MLB @ Bat 2010 in the iTunes store, and the app will be available for Android and Blackberry, too. Last year the the app brought streaming live video, highlights, audio, stats and a lot more. MLB @ Bat '09 was easily the best app of the major sports leagues. This year, it looks like new features will put more distance between baseball's app and the other major sports:
- Spring Training statistics, live audio and live video (mid-March)
- Live audio and live video (mid-March)
- Breaking news, as well as schedules, interactive rosters and player stats for every team
- Video library searchable by player and team
- Enhanced live game video (regular season)
- Home/Away broadcast feed selection (regular season)
- Background audio playback
The two biggest additions are in bold. Finally, MLB will start to take advantage of its endless supply of game video. Looking forward to seeing how robust the library is that they make available. And background audio playback is huge for the iPhone. Last year if you were listening to a game, that's all you could do. Now you can tuck a radio broadcast into the background while doing other stuff on your phone.
The app has bumped up in price to $14.99. Subscription fees to get access to all the live streaming games will cost more. Last year, MLB usually offered up two games per day for free with other games available for $.99 if you didn't want to pay the monthly subscription fee.
The MLB.com article says that more features are forthcoming as the season unfolds. Last year they dropped the live streaming video bomb in-season. What more could they add this year to sports' best mobile app?