Major League Baseball this week is widely debuting the MLB Film Room, a new digital video archive product aimed at enabling far greater user customization and distribution of the the league’s extensive film library.
Powered by Google Cloud and a specific outgrowth of a large-scale deal struck earlier this year between MLB and the technology giant, the MLB Film Room will feature a publicly accessible library with more than 3.5m baseball highlights and nearly three dozen filters to locate specific plays.
The Google deal in part seeks to leverage the company’s machine-earning technology, and some of the specific filters include specific player, team, defensive position, whether they bat right-handed or left-handed, and where a baserunner is located.
The enhanced tools of the MLB Film Room will enable the creation of customized highlight reels, and easy ability to embed clips natively on Twitter, other social media platforms, or individual websites.
The revamped library, which went through a soft debut earlier this year, features every pitch thrown in MLB play since 2017 and historical clips dating to 1929.
“We want to build a next-generation baseball video product that makes it easy for fans to find, watch, create, and share baseball videos,” said Vasanth Williams, MLB chief product officer and executive vice president of technology, strategy, and innovation.
“We don’t want baseball to be an aberration, but rather in line with how they already consume media and video,” he said.