The problem wasn't silverlight, it's the poor job the MLB did in creating their streaming application. That should be evident from the continued problems under Flash. Why bash silverlight when you obviously don't know anything about it?

The only thing Flash has on Silverlight is an installed base. Otherwise they are essentially the same technology (to the end user).

I'm trying to watch a game on my laptop as I read this article... I've actually switched to the audio feed because the video keeps freezing. I think I'm canceling this service.

Oh man you are so right about Tim McCarver and Joe Morgan, I can't stand listening to those two morons. Sat through a game with Joe Morgan and really wanted to throttle him. I've hated McCarver since the early 90's

While not the same thing, the MLB Radio function (which gives you both the home and away announcers for all games) is a pretty good deal, and always works for me. Or get XM radio

I was the one who emailed in the tip for the "bonus" feature article last year. I had an MLB giftcard for a considerable amount recently, so I stupidly dove in again (fantasy baseball addiction was a major factor).

Yet again, I went back to the abusive boyfriend. The feeds are crummy, the "HD" plugins aren't being detected, and when I'm watching a replay of a game, it randomly kicks back to the beginning.

What's great is that I noticed the "$10 less this season!" tags everywhere... yet it said the autorenew locked you in at "last year's prices". A buddy of mine autorenewed, lo and behold... they charged him $119 to stay, and I paid $109 to start over. Seems like a bit of misleading text.

that's disappointing to hear. i intended on renewing my subscription after reading about all the "upgrades" they made this season. may have to reconsider (or at least wait a few weeks to see if they work the kinks out).

From the perspective of one of the Flash developers on the MLB.TV project: [blogs.digitalprimates.net]

@StartingAces: On a side note, the MLB-At-Bat app for the iPhone is phenomenal so far.

A third bit of baseball/technology drama: all but one of the people I knew at Fenway with AT&T yesterday (myself included) could not get their phone to work within 500 feet of the park.

I guess I'm one of the lucky ones. I've watched several games on MLB.tv already, including the Giants and Brewers last night from the archived games (the archived version was up about 2 hours after the game ended). The picture looks fantastic and I have had very little stutter throughout.

I could be wrong, but it seems like there's a very vocal minority that a lot media outlets are listening to. Think about it - MLBAM can't really know how it will all hold up until it actually has regular numbers of people trying to access it at the same time. I'd expect any issues will be ironed out pretty quickly. We're two days into the season. I'm willing to give them a chance.

That's of course leaving out the terrible blackout policy, but that's another issue.

The HD feed worked perfectly for me yesterday watching the Red Sox play on a Mac.

I agree the MLB offerings are sub-par and borderline on a scam.

I am a huge baseball fan, and the team I follow is the Red Sox. I live in an area dominated by New York Yankees coverage.

So, I have been purchasing the MLB Extra Innings package each year, and each year I get to watch my team in standard definition, even after paying $200 for the privilege(!!)

It's my best option, though, so I pay for it. But I can't say I'm pleased in the slightest with the service I'm paying for.

I should at least be able to SELECT ONE team for which I always have HD coverage.

Slingbox, buy it.

I must be in the minority, but so far I have been extremely pleased the the MLB.TV Premium package. I seemed to have avoided the problems other users have encountered. I find the package far superior to the MLB Extra Innings DirecTV package. All the games are available with ones choice of home vs. away announcers.

When I connect my notebook to an HD TV with an HDMI connector, I find the picture quality fantastic. Far superior to what I get with a Slingbox.

This is my 4th (I think) season with MLB.tv.

Every year opening day is a disaster.
The first week is dissapointing.
And after that, I get to watch my hometown team play every game for under $1 a game.

Do I wish the quality was better sometimes? Yes. That said, I don't own a HDTV so the (not quite) HD broadcast I get from mlb.tv is better than what I'd get if I lived in St. Louis

Has every version of the player been buggy? Yep. But I don't get to pause games or choose audio feeds when I watched back home either. Plus, during the spring, there was always the danger of loosing cable/power due to thunderstorms.

Do they overpromise and underdeliver? For sure. That said, if the only thing they said in their marketing materials was "YOU GET TO WATCH ALL 162 GAMES FOR YOUR TEAM FROM ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD," I'd be in.

The service has plenty of problems and the people in charge seem to lack any ideas about strategy (which then feeds into the development and marketing). In the end, though, the value is amazing. 162 games of 2-3 hours for the price of 15-20 movie tickets, 4-5 (cheap) concert tickets or 5 dinners out.

This is the easiest $100 I spend on entertainment each year.

@rwakelan:
If I'm reading correctly, I think the issue was less the Silverlight technology and more that corporate machines are locked down such that installing new plug-ins is impossible. Since the Flash plug-in is already installed on most machines, a Flash feed would work for at-work types whereas a Silverlight feed would not.

I purchased this 2 days ago to watch opening day for the Cards. I live 6 (SIX!) hours away from St. Louis, and the service blacks me out saying i'm in their local market. Comcrap used to have a special baseball channel that would show the games on a public access channel, but quit that this year. DirecTV won't give me Fox Sports Midwest who caters the Cardinals, but serves up Fox Sports Southwest which follows the Texas teams.

Back to my point, how the shit do they expect me to watch my team? I know there are ways to spoof IPs *evil grin* but i'd prefer to have my games legally.

A side note, I had issues with MLB.com for an inning or two, mostly choppy feeds. But the new interface was brilliant and the HD quality was beautiful once that passed. I had no further issues the rest of the game...

@Aero1: I have a Slingbox for the in-market team I follow. I have mlb.tv to watch out-of-market games because I have a fantasy-baseball related addiction to games in general.

If you need to watch just one team, having a friend or family member rent an extra cable box and putting a Slingbox in their place is the way to go (my bud in DC does this for Mets games). MLB.tv is the only option to get all out of market games in HD... and it's consistently a turd in the early going.

@Jay Bibby: I agree. Paying for the extra innings package to watch my team (Mariners) in SD, knowing full well that the same FSN broadcasts are in HD in Washington, blows.

I bought a radio subscription in '04. I tried to cancel before the 05 season started but their 800 number customer service was awful. I could be on hold for hours and get disconnected. To cancel I had to dispute the credit card purchase and write a letter- I won. Would never use their services ever again.

@Mike Ortega: Try HotSpotShield. It should make you look like you're in another location.

I was the tipster for this article (yay!) and wanted to expand on my experience.

I'm expecting some people will wonder why fans pay for this service. For me, it's the only option. I live in England and we get the ESPN Sunday Night game every week at 2 a.m. but that's it. If I want to follow my O's, MLB.tv is sadly my only option.

I was willing to grant them some growing pains except that it happens every year.

Also, they are selling the service based on features not being provided. One of the big selling points for me was the "Condensed Game" feature, since I can't watch all 162 games. Guess what? This feature is mysteriously missing from the product that's out there right now.

I missed the first inning of Opening Day and instead got to watch a pixelated ad for how great MLB.tv is (not surprisingly, they can get the ads to run fine but not the game feeds!). As a lifelong baseball fan, that is a serious low blow.

Unfortunately, I can either pay for crappy service or not get baseball at all. What a choice. :(

MLB.tv has screwed customers for years!!! 3 years ago, mosaic was advertised as a feature of the service. Only, it wasn't available, but coming soon. Days passed. Months. Seasons. Years later, when it finally became workable, it was suddenly a bonus feature that you needed a premium account to use. This feature that I had already been paying for for years. Also, they never return phone calls. Last season, my service did not work for the first month. I called every day, but was told each time that no one could help me because they were really busy (poor mlb.tv) They'd take my number, promise to call back, and I missed game after game that I paid to watch. There is nothing more frustrating than having to search for and watch pirate streams when you are paying for the legit one. Well, never again. mlb.tv is trash.

@kwjayhawk: that was done within 2 minutes of receiving the blackout pop-up the other day my friend :)

I bought the Gameday Audio subscription last year ($15 for the season) and during the initial period where anyone could try it out for free the service was horrid. After that it worked as advertised. Admittedly they should be/have been prepared but it does explain some of what's been going on.

What's so aweful about Silverlight?

Some years it's definitely the minority that don't have any problems. I'm technically proficient, and MLB.tv does not function correctly on 2 of the 3 systems I've tried to use it on (borked on Vista and OSX, smooth sailing on the work XP machine).

It's just disappointing that the system never works close to 100% on the most anticipated days of the season.

@SoFlaSnowMan: This is the first year of MLB.TV, but I happy as well. I actually get quality feeds, even with the 4 game picture-in-picture (this is at work tho).

At home, the connection isn't as good, but I usually play it in the background for the audio while I'm doing other things. When it does "hiccup", I've noticed that the audio will keep playing and then the game will speed up to catch it.

Since I prefer the audio anyway, it's been solid enough to keep me happy.

I feel your pain, but am not suffering though, as I stopped caring about the 'game' back in 1994 after the strike. I do wish they would fix things for y'all, but I'm guessing they won't since they have your money. My suggestion would be a chargeback (since you didn't receive the product/service you paid for and you have already complained to the merchant; you did complain, right, and they haven't fixed the problem, so chargeback seems ok). Another choice for next year would be to not even sign up. Yeah, that means you have to go without seeing your team. Does your team know you're trying to watch and are having problems? How about everyone writing to the teams and letting them know. And since you're not able to go to the games (because you're not in the home market), you really want to support the team, but mlb isn't letting you. Who knows, maybe the owners will do something?

@josquin021: I was referring more to Alex's comment.

"They lowered the price and they got rid of awful Microsoft Silverlight in favor of Flash"

@Jay Bibby: What sucks is when you're a fan of a west coast team and you go to tune in to the channel the game is going to be on for Extra Innings and the Yankees are still playing, after the game ends they still proceed with interviewing the players, all while my west coast teams have already started but by the time the feed gets switched we're in the bottom of the 3rd on the game I originally wanted to watch. Did I mention they're broadcasting the same game on multiple channels too? Wouldn't it be easier if they had east coast games on one channel and west coast on another??

This is most likely an ISP or "internet backbone" problem. Once traffic leaves a sites network, it can no longer control it, nor guarantee its speed and latency. There are literally HUNDREDS of points along the line were a connection might be congested, and your packets get slowed down. Some companies try to fix this, by having special companies transmit the actual traffic to you, from their servers scattered all around the internet. This is usually successful, but not always. Heck the problem could be your kids upstairs running BitTorrent without limiting the speed of the file transfers. If you start filling your connections "pipe" then the video, which is very resource and time intensive can have serious problems.

@parkavery:

Wait a minute. They charge you $109 for access, and then they show you ads? Can you imagine Hulu charging you an access fee and then still showing ads?

@gaberussell: Just ads for MLB.tv, which is odd considering you have to buy MLB.tv to watch the ads for... MLB.tv. Go figure.

@gaberussell: The MLB.TV "ads" are MLB.TV filler shown when the feed is actually at commercial, thus limiting your exposure to actual TV commercials. I suppose they could go with a blank screen, but then people would probably think the system froze.

@AsaBurns: MLB can, indeed, "know how it will all hold up" beforehand. It's called load testing and they suck at it. :)

@rwakelan: Silverlight is no picnic. Has been giving those of us here in the IT dept. fits. I never thought I'd see the day that I liked flash, but it sure is a whole lot easier on our work order system.

What's with the Silverlight bashing?

Silverlight was used in stellar fashion by both NBC during the Olympics and CBS during the early rounds of the NCAA tournament. The video in both cases was rock-solid, and both had great interactive experiences.

MLB's problems aren't with Silverlight or Flash--they're simply a lack of server infrastructure and bandwidth. Embarrassing for a paid product.

@bball123h: They used to have a (strangely hypnotic) Pacman-type interstitial, and I've also seen them go to a wide stadium shot w/o audio during commercial breaks.

I draw the line at having the "ads" up *during* the game, which happened on Opening Day.

@iotashan: I replied to his blog:

"To quote Dagny Taggart, 'I asked you to do a job, not do your best. Whatever that is.'"

@Norcross: Yes, XM is the way to go.

I can listen to any game on XM, have another on the gametracker if I want, and have a third on the TV with the sound off if there's one on ESPN or Fox Sports Net. I couldn't keep up with any more, and I already have the DirecTV and XM subscriptions so this costs me nothing extra.

@I_am_Awesome: The only complaint the article seems to have about Silverlight is that some companies don't have it installed on workers' computers, and so they were unable to use MLB.TV.

It's only half an argument... Flash has a far superior install base than Silverlight, but I'm not sure that people not being able to watch baseball at work is a valid complaint.

If you've got the iPhone, I find the MLB at-bat application great for the price. It's $9.99 (one time), and to this point, I'm relieved of the misery that I've had in the past with MLB-TV, a truly frustrating product. You get video highlights, but obviously no broadcasting yet. I enjoy listening just as well as watching baseball anyway, so it works for me. At a fraction of the price.

MLB has a very cheap service where you can listen to all the games.

It's $14.95 for every team and every game they play for one season. I recommend it.

[www.mlb.com]

@parkavery: You get lousy service with MLB.tv AND you live in England?

Talk about a double whammy of suck!

(I'm from England, I'm allowed to trash it)

One way around home market issues that I’ve used is to stream the games you want via a Slingbox. If you still have family / good friends in the teams home area who can either watch the games or have a spare cable box you can hook the Slingbox up to it works pretty well. Obviously this isn’t for everyone, it requires equipment, broadband on both ends and a fair bit of trust, but it does work.

@iotashan:

The article actually called Silverlight aweful:

"They lowered the price and they got rid of awful Microsoft Silverlight in favor of Flash so people could watch it at work"

What it mentions later (being able to watch from work) is a good reason to be glad they switched to Flash, but it's not a reason why Silverlight is aweful. I'm wondering why the Consumerist thinks Silverlight is so aweful.

I prefer Silverlight to Flash. Silverlight is MUCH less of a CPU hog, which is Flash's worst sin in my opinion.

@JDAC: Even worse - I'm English by choice! ;)

(American expat and soon-to-be British citizen)

I've been using mlb.tv for the past three years, and I've grown used to the first week just Not Working. In this case the "tech support" on the mlb forums consists of people telling those of us having issues to disable their antivirus, disable their firewall, remove and reinstall flash and the "autobahn" high-def plug in, defrag their computer, and restart the machine. This is regardless of the problem actually being brought up. Now they've moved on to having people direct all of their complaint to the vendor that provided the plugin.

This is absolutely ludicrous. They have a half-baked product that they're charging people $109.95 to beta test.