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Major League Baseball Releases Webcasting Plans

Posted by chrisd on from the bring-back-the-mbone dept.

TopShelf writes "With spring in the air, it's time to discuss the (US) national pastime. According to this story at CNN, Major League Baseball is planning to webcast 1,000 games this season. The interesting part is that in order not to violate TV blackout rules, they'll try to deny service to viewers who instead have local broadcasts available, using Quova's user-location service. At last, an opportunity to see my hometown Detroit Tigers more than once a year!"

3 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Proxy by bradams · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wonder how they will deal with viewers via proxy?

    --
    I like to build things and wire stuff together.
    1. Re:Proxy by Tolchz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Where do companies get off thinking that they can be judge, jury, and executioner ?

      I wonder what Visa will do when you dispute a $100 charge on your credit card.

  2. Bud Selig can bite me! by imadork · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Forget video on the web, what really steams me os the fact that they raised the prices of audio on the web again!.

    Years ago, the individual radio stations apparently owned the rights to the audio of baseball games, and I listened to them directly from their web site, for free (and heard the local commercials, too...) Then, I think it was about two or three years ago, MLB "found" the Internet and decided it should control all audio broadcasts. Of course, by "control", I mean "Charge $10/yr for what used to be free.".

    Last year, they raised the subscription fee to $12/yr. This year, they are apparently raising it to $19.95/yr. And after all that, they still have the local commercials! The commercials are supposedly paying for the broadcast, can't they have them pay for the Internet broadcast too?

    I understand that if they provided the service for free, there would be a lot more people using it, and bandwidth isn't free. But did bandwidth costs really go up 100% in the past two or three years? If not, I think a more likely explanation is that Baseball (indeed, all sports) are filled with greedy owners, spoiled players, and weak executives, and that the cost of being a fan will shortly get prohibitive for most people.