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

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.

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: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.

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!

Sports News Matters?

[fishbowl]

I thought this was "News For Nerds"

Since when are nerds and geeks into sports?