MLB says Multitasking Increased Live Viewing 86% Year-Over-Year in its 'At Bat' iPad App

  by Husain Sumra

In February, Major League Baseball introduced multitasking to its At Bat iPad app, allowing users to view its video inside the app while using Slide Over and Split View as well as outside the app with picture-in-picture. MLB tells TechCrunch that the adoption of the features has had a "profound impact" on live video consumption on iPad.


During the first two weeks of the current baseball season, MLB found that fans who had the multitasking update spent 20 more minutes per day watching live video on the iPad compared to last year. On average, fans who used the new multitasking options while watching video were spending 162 minutes a day watching MLB's content, which is an 86 percent increase from last year. Fans who did not use the multitasking features while watching video watched an average of 101 minutes per day.

MLB's data was only counted on iPads that support full multitasking capabilities, like the iPad Pro, iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 4, although Slide Over is also available on the iPad Air and the iPad mini 2 and later. As noted by TechCrunch, MLB's app was already the most consumed app in terms of minutes, with users watching 6.9 million minutes of content during the 2015 regular season. ESPN was in second place with 6.1 million minutes.