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.

Comments

actually, no...

[jmorse]

Major League Baseball was granted an exemption from antitrust laws by congress.

Re:actually, no...

[alkali]

Not quite. In 1922, the Supreme Court held that insofar as the federal antitrust laws apply only to interstate commerce, baseball is beyond the reach of those laws, because a baseball game is played in only one state at a time. (If you think this is peculiar reasoning, you are not alone. Legal scholars generally agree that this is one of the worst opinions Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. ever wrote, the other major contender being a case in which a woman was permitted to be sterilized because she had a low IQ.)

Congress has "granted" baseball an exemption insofar as it has not corrected the Supreme Court's decision, a decision which subsequent Supreme Court cases have treated as binding though they have more or less acknowledged that the original decision was wrong.

There's this great thing...

[EvlPenguin]

...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!
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I don't see any problems with this.

[Moonwick]

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.

cartel?

[shren]

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.

If you look

[SquadBoy]

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.

Re:If it's not on radio

[Tower]

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.
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New Slashdot Stories (Almighty Buck category)

[sulli]

Coming soon, to inspire your anger and fury:

- 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!

Adventures in Sports Logic

[interstellar_donkey]

Here in Arizona I've been watching with some amusement (though mostly annoyance) how sports broadcasts are distributed.

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.

helpful clarifications

[RafeDawg]

A lot of people seem to be jumping to conclusions about how this will work. An interview with the president of MLB.com clarifies some details that are rather vague in the various press releases. Important points are that there will be ads, and that the video highlight package is separate from the radio broadcast. Also, the local sportscasters will be retained, and local radio station webcasts will be "phased out," meaning that you can still listen for free for a while.

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.

Sports News Matters?

[fishbowl]

I thought this was "News For Nerds"

Since when are nerds and geeks into sports?