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Major League Baseball Releases Webcasting Plans
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!"
Blooming, blithering, drivelling, sputtering, drooling morons. But this is what we have come to expect from Bud Selig, unfortunately.
sulli
RTFJ.
Posting AC because this will be modded as off-topic, even though the topic is Major League Baseball and their electronic assets.
mlb.com They have a java aplett or something that shows a baseball diamond, who's up, The score/ pitch count of every game. During the playoffs They were showing where each pitch was (With a box for the strike zone.)
Its pretty incredible. Baseball is a very data intensive sport
You have to understand - once every generation, the Tigers rise up and have a great team (1984, 1968, 1945, etc.). In the meantime, they usually fight hard and contend at least until the end of April. That, at least, removes any distractions from watching the Red Wings in the Stanley Cup playoffs...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
They make you pay a lot for it, and then won't let you watch local games? Not only that, but any time that there is a nationally broadcast game on ESPN, you can't watch any online games.
How many people do they hope to sign up for this?
The first radio broadcasts were essentially faked...the announcer was not at the park. He had someone relay him the bare facts over the phone, and he would add color commentary according to his imagination and experience with the game. Radio listeners thought he was at the game, and followed every word. This proved to be a hit, and broadcasters were eventually allowed to be inside the park for live action commentary.
What does this have to do with broadbandcasts? Wait and see what content actually shows up on the net... Is it real, or is it Memorex?
Considering a huge amount of traffic will appears to come from Virginia (AOL's big ass proxy) it's funny that there's no local team to block.
Modern baseball tends to get boring. Over expansion has dilluted the talent pool so badly that (for example) pitchers who *might* have made the big leagues twenty years ago as part time relievers are now full time, middle rotation starters. Boring, home-run derby ball.
If they really wanted to churn up a buck they could make available radio broadcasts of 'old time' games. Even better, make them freely available as a move to generate interest in the sport. Think of the benefits and possibilities.
One, you've got MASSIVE amounts of content. IF you got back to the pre-WW2 era you're looking at 20+ clubs playing over 144 games per year. You've games from hall of famers like mickey mantle, ted williams, or jackie robinson playing. This could introduce a younger audience to people they've only heard stories about.
Two, Niche markets and fan base expansion. I live in michigan and have been stuck with the piss poor tigers. Yet, I'm a big fan of the cubs thanks to having WGN tv. Image being able to equally expose all 32 teams in all markets. Long term you could see an overall rise in attendance (fans going to their local park to see their favorite out of state team).
As for niche markets, I'm also brooklyn dodgers fan. The team moved out of new york around the time my father was born. Yet I'd love to sit back on a summer day, and listen to a brooklyn dodgers game. I can't be the only one like this.
Third, and finally, Color. Listening to a game today sounds boring. Most teams have radio annoucers with communications degrees. They call baseball games until they can get a job as news casters. In the 'good old days' you had guys like Harry Carey, or Ernie Harwall who made the most boring baseball game a work of art. There's a great oral history and tradition in baseball. Most of it is lost on guys now. Those intersting, non sequitor stories than a broadcaster can tell during a dull game are what separate the good color men from the bad. think of the stories that are sitting in a vault rusting away right now.
An added benefit of making the old school games available is that you'd have to transfer them off of whatever media they're stored on now (probably steel wire or even wax in some cases, certainly magentic tape for the majority of games) is that you preserve the games for the ages.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I'd be more than happy to send you digital copies of the Detroit Tigers games, if you supply me with the hardware to get it into one of my Linux boxes. :-)
Of course, watching a Detroit Tigers game probably isn't going to be all that interesting, though with Trammel, Parrish, and Gibson behind the scenes now, it should at least be better than the last few seasons! All we need is Mr. Sweet Lou Whitaker back.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
The second time I got spammed with a pop-up window by RealOne, with no way to disable them, I called Real to cancel my MLB subscription.
At least Real was prompt with the refund. Paying for it is one thing. Paying for it and getting spammed in return is unacceptable.
When I want to know if people are full of crap I tracert them
What?? How does this let you know if people are full of crap?
sig.
Actually this is an issue here in the New York area. Most of the Mets and Yankees games are "broadcast" on cable. Plus NYC area viewers who subscribe to Cablevision don't even have the option of watching the Yankees because Cablevision refuses to carry the YES cable network. If you can't watch baseball over the air or on cable (in the case of the Yankees), then what is the point of a blackout?
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www.moneybythenumbers.com
But the IP->geo-location schemes are lucky if they can get your continent right... Expecting them to not deny service to at least some people who aren't within broadcast range isn't realistic.
Plus, what about people with internet access but no TV? I'm one of them, but I suspect that most of us (like me) don't care about baseball. Funny how that works...
(TV/sports/stupid vs internet/smart/conceited)
So, between fall 2000 and fall 2001, this American was living in Ireland. As a NY Mets fan, I was addicted to watching the game on espn.com and listening via webcasts.
Then the trouble began. About a month into the season, it just stopped working. I talked with the SysAdmin at the Irish University I was at (DCU), and nothing had changed with the ports/firewalls/whatever.
Clearly something changed at MLB. I emailed all the different addresses I could come up with, and didn't get a single human reply. They had no problem charging me $10 (advertised $9.95, but they threw in a nickel for "shipping" -- don't get me started on that one), but they never fixed the problem, addressed it, or offered me a refund.
So, I wouldn't buy the service. They screwed me over by (a) not fixing the service when it stopped working, (b) overcharging me for their service, and (c) having the balls to charge for shipping a streamed audio over the Internet.
Screw them.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
For a long time, not one of the three teams in New York (the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants, of course) would allow radio broadcasts because they were afraid that radio would damage the ticket sales.
The toughest part about watching Tigers game is knowing that the payroll from last year opening day was about $55,000,000. The Red Wings, the greatest team on the planet, has a payroll of $66,085,756 (as of Feb 14th). Hopefully Tram can turn things around.
The technology is there for people to broadcast Max Headroom-style (or maybe Gargoyle-style) 1st-person singular video accounts of things like -- for instance -- baseball games, complete with commentary, stats and mugshots gathered instantly from Google, overlaid local weather conditions scraped from the Weather Underground ... (Why don't more notebooks have built-in video cameras? Seems an idea worth having other than as a novelty.) Right now, the effect (if done in near-real time on a middle-class budget) would be a lot like the old Quicktime postage stamp movies, since the Good Stuff in the way of cameras, mics, editing programs and the requisite computer platform would cost way too much to look professional, but look 3 and 10 years down the road ...
... Solaris? Bueller?). Fine print (maybe a placard you walk past in line on the way into the ballpark, or on the ticket you buy) that says you can't even narrate over a cell phone to a friend what you're seeing from the stadium seats. No contract, though there is (arguably meaningful) consent: you could decide not to attend the game, or not to buy the DVD, etc. The music industry doesn't want you to rip your CDs and listen to them other than from the original media, Jamie Kellner doesn't want you skipping commercials, etc etc ;)
... maybe soon DVDs really *will* carry a shrinkwrap license that says by purchasing you agree not to play the contained movie except on sanctioned equipment. [I'm not talking about re-selling unauthorized copies or arranging free local showings for admissions -- just *watching* them, say, on a computer running Debian.] CDs would carry licenses that say "This product may only legally be played three times before self-destructing. Attempts to prolong the life of the music it contains is a prosecutable offense under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Bummer about fair use, ha ha."
However, it's a bit like buying a DVD (and finding no legal way at present -- someone correct me if that's no longer true -- to view its content on other than an annointed operating system (Mac OS or OS X, Windows
What's worse than the present situation (where so many hidden and esoteric rules hold sway) is even worse to my mind: I forsee an increasing flood of fine-print, sir-don't-worry-about-these-technicalities, but BOY do we have some technicalities to go through before you can eat here / walk through the museum / sketch trees in the park / take note of the fine and copyrighted smells in our greenhouse. More formal "licenses" not just on software, but everywhere, minor Gotchas which don't just prohibit illegal for-profit exploitation of copyrighted works, but ever more of the *normal* things which common sense currently holds to be among the rights of customers
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Since we're in different towns, and both signing up for this service, if I proxy it for you and you for me we've both got total coverage. I'm perfectly happy to connect to you for this through ipsec. They'll never know.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
WWE already webcasts their pay-per-views, and while NASCAR doesn't do webcasts, you can access telemetry from all the cars in the Winston Cup races, and see a ton of real-time data on the races while you watch it on FOX (or ABC later in the season) using their TrackPass site features.
I'm not particularly excited that MLB is doing it. It sounds to me like another desperate ploy to get fans back after they abused us with their "I deserve more money even though I have enough $100 bills lying around to wipe my ass with for the rest of my life" spoiled rich boy player strikes.
Forget baseball -- NASCAR is the new national pastime.
evil adrian