All The Bells & Whistles of MLB.TV

Major League Baseball was one of the first (if not the first) Internet TV success stories, outside of the porn business, with their MLB.TV streaming service. They began dabbling in streaming live baseball games back in 2002 (they did 30 that year), and today you can watch all ~2,400 games per season, both live and on-demand, with some of the best HD-quality streaming & playback available anywhere.

For the privilege of access to MLB.TV, which offers up this feast of baseball, you have to pony up $20-25/month (depending on whether you want the basic or “Premium” package) or buy the entire season for $100-120. And the catch is this only gets you “out-of-market” and “non-national-broadcast” games. Which means you cannot watch

    Your local team
    Any game broadcast nationally on FOX or ESPN (although the ESPN games are available on Internet TV via ESPN3)
    All playoff & World Series games

Major League Baseball is one of the few true monopoly enterprises in the United States, and the myriad contracts they have in place with local rights owners (e.g. Comcast & the local NBC affiliate here in the San Francisco Bay Area) means the local cable/satelite operators still trump Internet TV where viewing rights are concerned.

In my case, it’s because Comcast still wants me to buy a cable subscription to watch my local team, the SF Giants. In some markets you can get around this, if your cable operator has struck a special deal with MLB (SD Padres is an example of one of the few teams which have this going), and you pay an additional fee on top of your cable and MLB.TV subscriptions – holy mackerel that’s alot of dough just to watch ballgames.

But I digress, as I’m getting into a very thorny issue that warrants it’s own post. Let’s get back to a look at the Bells & Whistles of MLB.TV, which in the context of an Internet TV experience I define as the following:

Anything that you don’t need to enjoy the simple pleasure of watching the ball game.

There are a few different ways to get to the player, but I generally look at a list of the day’s games on MLB.com and make my selection there.