Major League Baseball awarded geolocation patent

By Ben Klayman

CHICAGO, May 15 (Reuters) - Major League Baseball has won a patent for technology that blocked certain fans from viewing local games online, and it may open the door for the U.S. sports league to profit by licensing it to media companies.

Baseball's advanced media business was awarded a U.S. patent last month for online geolocation technology, a system that uses two or more electronic methods (such as wireless and satellite) to pinpoint the geographic location of a subscriber, the sports league said in a statement late on Thursday.

The sports league filed for the patent, its first, in 2004 as a way of excluding certain fans from watching its games streamed live online.

MLB wanted to block reception of games in a subscriber's local market as a way of protecting the hundreds of millions of dollars its 30 clubs receive in rights fees from such regional sports networks as the New York Yankees' YES or Boston Red Sox's NESN.

"This was a clear example where necessity really was the mother of invention," Bob Bowman, chief executive of baseball's advanced media arm, said on Friday in a telephone interview.

Baseball now could approach any company using multiple geolocation technologies to determine a subscriber's location and ask for a licensing fee, analysts said. The other options would be for those companies to try to work around baseball's patent or challenge it in court.

However, the narrow scope of MLB's patent (it must be at least two geolocation technologies used in conjunction with a subscriber model) will likely limit the league's reach, said Ray Valdes, a Gartner analyst specializing in the Internet and Web services.

Also, media companies are not flocking to make money through an online subscription model and the patent will likely have the most impact on the sports world, he said.