Major League Baseball's MLB.com is conducting various mobile initiatives in an effort to reach out to baseball fans.

It has launched applications for BlackBerry and iPhone, mobile games, live play-by-play game coverage and several SMS campaigns. The company uses mobile to brand itself and gain revenue from pay-per-downloads, subscribers and advertising.

"We asked ourselves, 'How do we leverage all the great content on MLB.com when fans are not in front of their TV or PC?' and the answer was mobile," said Adam Ritter, vice president of wireless for MLB.com, New York. "We've taken many of the products fans have come to enjoy on MLB.com and brought them to their mobile devices, and we're going continue to develop our mobile products and services."

MLB.com's mobile products include wallpapers and ringtones, the MLB 2008 mobile game, Gameday and Gameday Audio providing real-time coverage of every MLB game and applications specifically optimized for Research In Motion's BlackBerry and Apple's iPhone.

"Fans can listen to live games on most carriers with Gameday Audio, which includes home, away and Spanish broadcasts," Mr. Ritter said.

The company's mobile subscription services include Team Alerts, which provides SMS and video updates related to each fan's favorite team.

"We're enhancing the product with video alerts," Mr. Ritter said. "For example, we'll deliver a video of your favorite player hitting a homerun to your handset."

MLB.com also offers Player Alerts, geared toward fans who play fantasy baseball to update them on all the daily statistics of players on their team.

The third subscription service is Team TXT, which sends SMS messages updating fans about scores, news and weather related to their favorite team.

Each of the three services costs $3.99 per month plus carriers' standard messaging rates. Fans can sign up at MLB.com or by texting the name of the team or player to short code 65246 ('MLBGO').

In response, they will get a message with the latest news or scores, plus the call-to-action "4 Alerts Reply GET YANKEES."

If they do so, fans will get a second message: "To confirm New York Yankees Alerts for $3.99/month, reply YES within 24hrs. You will receive 15-20 alerts/week & can customize at mlb.com/mdash."

"This is real time content, so it's perishable, so if we don't deliver it to them on their handset, they'll get it somewhere else," Mr. Ritter said. "We redeveloped all the content on MLB.com to be consumed on the go, including scores, stats and trade news."

MLB.com's mobile offerings also redirect fans to the company's mobile site at http://mlb.com.

"The mobile site has been great to us," Mr. Ritter said. "With advanced mobile browsers on devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry, the experience is getting very close to what you'd expect on a PC."

The iPhone application MLB.com At Bat is not available on any other device and can be downloaded for a one-time at the iTunes Apps Store.

"It's amazing to us all the innovation that's happening with the iPhone," Mr. Ritter said. "It has the largest screen and it steams media beautifully."

The mobile Web site is available across all carriers. One of the mobile Internet site's features is Gameday, a pitch-by-pitch data application with graphics and real-time scores and stats.

"One of the challenges in delivering to mobile is fragmentation between carriers and operating systems, but we've made our site compatible with all and baseball fans seem to have taken to it rather well," Mr. Ritter said. "We want to leverage the brand that they've come to know and use regularly."

In addition, the mobile Internet site employs device detection to optimize the experience for consumers.

"We know you're on a specific handset, so we can optimize functions such as streaming multimedia and we ask if you'd like to listen to the game," Mr. Ritter said. "We've taken the time to optimize the application for each device based on its screen size, memory capabilities and graphic ability."