Microsoft struk a lucrative advertising slash professional tool deal to provide Surface tablets to the NFL, and now Apple is after the same kind of exposure. The Cupertino giant has opted for a quite different sport and went after Major League Baseball, but other than that, the premise of the new deal seems to be the same.
In exchange for exposure during games, Apple will provide specially tailored iPad Pro units to each team in the league, to be used as professional tools. The devices in question will be of the bigger 12.9-inch variety (more visible on camera, I guess), bear the team logo and be tailored to its specific needs, like a digital playbook of sorts. Some potential features could include access to historical game statistics and various data analysis on the fly even down to pitcher-batter match simulations.
On the software part of things, the iPad Pro's will be running a specialized iOS app, called MLB Dugout, built in-house by MLB's Advance Media Division. It is intended as a standalone solution, meaning that each iPad will be fed with only the owner team's specific data, as opposed to a cloud-based solution. This should help protect security and guard sensitive tactical data, although judging by the adoption difficulties Microsoft has been facing with its NFL contract, we can only expect to see the iPads mostly hang around as a banner background for some time to come.
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