Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball is a professional baseball league and the highest level of organized baseball in the United States and Canada.
Baseball is an American tradition, but this generation of fans has it better than any other. Today’s fan can watch their favorite teams anywhere they have an internet connection.
For MLB, staying future fierce with Broadleaf meant being ready for future growth and innovation on top of a platform already offered to hundreds of thousands of fans.
The challenge
Major League Baseball is made up of 30 distinct club teams, each with their own home stadium and 162 regular season games per team, for a total of 2,430 games a year, plus the playoffs. And with millions of fans tuning in over the internet, via MLB.tv and At Bat, MLB continues to innovate both in person and online.
With streaming services over any device, as well as unique experiences through clubs and at stadiums, MLB needed a platform that could handle complex subscriptions, digital entitlements, club services, scoreboard messaging, and promotional offers.
Key challenges
Thousands of concurrent service agents
Tens of thousands of entitlements per minute
Hundreds of thousands of daily subscriptions
The Broadleaf solution
MLB leveraged Broadleaf Microservice-based Subscription and Entitlement services to independently handle hundreds of thousands of subscription renewals and millions of streaming viewers and listeners.
The Microservice-based technology hosted on Google Cloud allows MLB to quickly respond to traffic spikes, ensuring quick customer access to content that is made for performant scalability. Club, promo services and scoreboard services also leveraged Broadleaf’s Headless Commerce solution, leveraging out of box as well as custom built APIs in order to ensure each integrated system operates with a seamless customer experience.
How we solved it better
Broadleaf Headless Commerce Solution
Subscriptions & Entitlements
PIM, Cart and Checkout feature sets
The Business Impact
During opening week, a record 650,000 subscription renewals were processed in a single day using Broadleaf’s Subscription commerce services. And according to Radesh Rao, VP of Software Engineering at MLB, “Broadleaf handled a demand spike 57% over last year without breaking a sweat."
The opening day of the Yankees game had the highest traffic and as Kristina Pigneri, VP of Operations at Broadleaf Commerce stated, “During the initial 30 minutes of Opening Day, Broadleaf handled 40,000 requests per minute which scaled to a peak of 56,000 requests per minute, with servers at only 25% of load.” Beyond Opening Day and week, Broadleaf’s Headless Commerce solution continues year round to provide commerce solutions across all 30 teams, 30 stadiums, MLB.tv and At Bat platforms across every channel and device ranging from Apple to Android to Amazon, serving millions of baseball fans around the world.
