Slashdot Mirror
Baseball Fans Must Pay To Listen Online
blair1q writes: "The AP is reporting that MLB and RealNetworks have formed a cartel to embargo broadcasts of baseball games, charging listeners $9.99 for the season. No word on whether they will continue to broadcast the commercials along with the games. No word on whether you will be forced to pay $29.95 for a registered copy of RealNetworks' software. No word on whether RealNetworks will improve the quality and reliability, or MLB will guarantee availability of the feeds, or you can move from machine to machine with your access intact. The words 'suck' and 'criminal' want to appear here in the worst way." Especially after team owners extort taxpayers to help build their stadiums. Of course, pay-per-view events aren't new, but pay-per-listen sports broadcasting? Webcams, laptops and Ricochet (in participating cities) seem appropriate.
Do you at least get a baseball cap or bat with your purchase?
Major League Baseball was granted an exemption from antitrust laws by congress.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
...called a radio. It's really cool. You can listen to sports broadcasts on the go, or sit back and listen to some tunes! You can even be intellectually stimulated by some talk radio! Think of the possibilities!
--
--
#nohup cat
I'm usually in the minority on things like this, but I think it's pretty irresponsible to assume the worst about something like this.
Sports broadcasts are usually paid for by radio stations which then recoup the expense through ad sales. Assuming the $9.95/season gives you the rights to listen to every game, sans-ads, how is this "unethical", "criminal" or "immoral"?
Why is the slashdot community so vehemently opposed to companies making money through honest means? This stuff costs money. Deal with it.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
Don't like it, don't buy it. That simple. Or are you implying that this service is evil and we should crush it under a torrent of flamebait posts, which won't weigh on real networks any heavier than a slightly uncomfortable hat?
If something's broadcasted over the net, someone has to pay for it, and it's surely not going to be them. They are trying to make money offering streaming, a unpopular thing at slashdot but a necessary thing none the less.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
here you will see that this does in fact require the "Gold Pass" service. And that yes you do in fact have to have the non-free player to use the gold pass service.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I'm not a big MLB fan, so I'm probably less concerned about this than I would be if it was a different issue, but let's be realistic.
This is entertainment, and people will pay a large amount of money for entertainment. MLB is in business to make money while entertaining.
If people want MLB coverage, and it's offered for a fee, then they can pay the fee or not get the entertainment.
In many ways this is analagous to cable carrying local TV stations. "Why would I pay for what I can get for free?"
Because picture quality and signal strength are much better, that's why. Don't like it? Get out the rabbit ears.
So, WRT MLB for a fee...Don't want to pay? Find free entertainment.
Free MLB is not a right guaranteed by the constitution. Deal with it.
Regards,
Anomaly
PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you.
If you would like to know more about this, please email me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Yeah, I'm a Yankees fan transplanted in Minnesota - If I could pay $10 for a season of games, I'd love it - with this hopefully the coverage will be better, since not all the games were net broadcast last year. I just hope there would be some type of QoS agreement - audio for a game is pretty low bandwidth (and great for daytime (worktime) games), but if you get into the video feeds, there needs to be some minimal quality, or it isn't worth it (baseball is a great game to listen to on radio, if the announcers are worth their salt).
$10... that's just over $0.06/game if you listen to all of your favorite team's games... not too shabby... for those that listen to even more, a real bonus.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
look at it this way, it's probably aimed primarily at people who are located outside of the broadcast area of the team they are interested in, e.g., NY Yankee fans living in California. Satellite TV season sports packages easily cost upwards of 100 dollars per season, if not more. People living within the broadcast market will just watch Tv/listen to the radio. Even if I were on a business trip and wanted to catch the action of the latest home team's game, 9 bucks is quite reasonable even for a one time fee, heck that's about how much it costs for a couple of pr0n flicks in a hotel pay-per-view. As far as commercials go, in baseball it's not even an issue considering they have commercial breaks anyway between innings. It's a pity it won't be free anymore but servers and bandwidth cost money. I think 9 bucks is a pretty reasonable price.
NO CARRIER
- Restaurants Charge For Food, Require Additional Charge for Coffee and Alcoholic Beverages
- Money-Grubbing ISPs Charge More for High-Bandwidth Lines, Even Though They're Used for Napster, Gnutella, and Freenet
- ThinkGeek Charges Hundreds for MP3 Players, which are Critical to Your Rights Online
I know, it's shocking. But it's true!
sulli
RTFJ.
Basically we're at the point now where web sports broadcasts are like meatspace sports broadcasts. In meatspace, if you want the broadcasts for your home team, you can more or less do it on local radio or local television for free. If you want to watch out-of-town games, you pay for cable or satellite access so you can watch games on ESPN or DirecTV or whatever. I mean, come on... (as other posters have noted) if you only want to hear your home team's games... why are you getting it over the web anyway? Just turn on the radio. :)
You have to remember how this works from a business perspective. No matter how many people listen to a radio broadcast, it costs the station the same amount of money to broadcast it. That's NOT the case with a RealAudio broadcast because each user consumes additional bandwidth and additional CPU time on the broadcaster's side!
Still, it would be nice if we could get to the point where online advertisers and businesses could have deals where the advertisers basically pay per online viewer... that way hopefully as the amount of users increases, the amount of ad revenue would increase at the same rate as the bandwidth/cpu costs and then maybe online broadcasts could be free again? I think the only thing holding this back as cluelessness/skittishness on the part of the advertisers....
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
In the Fall, they will not broadcast the local football team locally, or on cable. Your only option to view the game is in person, at a sports bar, or using the Sunday Ticket on the sat. These are the options for me to view a game that is being played less then a mile from my apartment. I can, however, listen to the game live on the net, or watch games from other parts of the country on TV. (But somehow it looses something when I can hear fireworks outside my window and then wait 45 seconds or so to find out what happened on the net broadcast).
Now that it's basketball season, I can watch most away games on broadcast TV, but can only see home games if I subsribe to cable (home games are shown on a special Cox channel). Any other broadcast is blocked out, meaning if I have Sat and they are showing the game on TNT, TNT will be blocked for three hours. It costs money to hear it on the net.
The result: more often then not, I find my self chatting with people from other states to find out how my home town teams are doing. Somehow I'm missing the logic of pro-sports marketers here.
The Internet is generally stupid
All MLB Baseball games should be Free
Groups of independent fans could build their own stadiums whereever they please, so long as everyone is able to sit there at no charge.
You could have your own MLB games anytime, as long as you made the players available to everyone!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Basically, you're paying 10 bucks to have every game be available in english, spanish, and french with either the home or visiting broadcaster. In many cases, these options were available before. I don't think its worth it, but as a Yankee fan in Ohio I don't have much of a choice and I'll pay it.
The video highlight service they describe is completely different. It sounds as though that is what you need GoldPass (and therefore non-free RealPlayer) for. Also, it won't even launch until May and promises to give you access to every pitch of every game throughout the season. That seems like a pretty powerful tool, although when it comes through RealPooper software who knows what it will be like.
------- Was it just a coincidence I got moderator points the first time I logged on to
I thought this was "News For Nerds"
Since when are nerds and geeks into sports?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.