NuclearDonkey.net

I finally gave in this year and ordered the MLB.tv premium service for the new baseball season. For any baseball fans not familiar with it, MLB.tv is just what it sounds like -- a subscription service for streaming webcasts of every Major League Baseball game (with some exceptions) during the season. This year, the basic service runs $79.95 and gets you a basic quality single video feed of each available game. For $30 extra, they add "HD quality" picture, the ability to watch up to four games in a splitscreen, optional home/away feeds, and a few other extras.

After the first week of nearly non-stop baseball, here are my thoughts on the good and bad thus far.

Play ball!

• I get all the baseball I could possibly want to watch, including almost all the Red Sox and Cubs games.
• The "HD-quality" feeds (which they call NexDef) aren't really HD in the sense of HDTV, but they're great quality for streaming video.
• It's all online, so I can always have a game playing in the background whether I'm at home or work. And I can continue living without cable/satellite TV (too much money for almost nothing worth watching).
• The splitscreen and picture-in-picture options are very cool for days when the Sox and Cubbies are playing at the same time.
• The home/away feed option is also neat. I can always watch games with the announcers from Boston/Chicago.

Game in rain delay

• Games are subject to blackout restrictions that make little sense. Despite being 300 miles away from them, I'm not allowed to watch any Nationals or Orioles games. They seem to base this on IP address, though, so you just need to proxy through a server outside the blacked out region.
• Also blacked out are *all* of the 4pm Saturday games each week. Apparently Fox owns exclusive rights to broadcasting them.
• A subscription only includes the regular season. The playoffs remain in the realm of regular old television.
• The NexDef feeds require a third-party plugin that only runs on Windows and MacOS. This did give me an excuse to try out the Windows 7 beta, but it's a shame they don't have a Linux version.
• The feeds (especially using NexDef) can thrash even the mightiest PC. This seems to have been resolved after the first few days, but it was unsettling to see a simple video stream eating up 100% of my CPU and half a gig of RAM.
• There have been other issues as well. For example, there have been a few occasions where my feed of choice has gone offline and I've had to revert to the other.
• It's all online, so the video quality is subject to your internet connection's speed and stability. My home internet connection always seems to hiccup during the most important pitches. The feed does automatically adjust its quality based on connection speed, but sudden stutters will still cause the video to pause momentarily.

Overall, now that they seem to have most of the kinks worked out, I'm pretty pleased. But give me a NexDef client for Linux, keep the feed outages to a minimum, and get my ISP to stabilize their service and I'll be ecstatic.

According to MLB.com, the highest quality HD streams on MLB.tv run at 3Mb/sec. So let's do some math.

3 Mb/sec * 3600 sec/hr * 3 hr appx game legnth = 32400 Mb/game

32400 Mb/game / 1024 mb/gb / 8 bits/byte = 3.95 GB/game

Jetbroadband's* fastest, highest-cap plan has a bandwidth cap of 100GB. Something is very wrong here.

I understand that ISPs don't want people downloading hundreds of gigabytes of torrents every month, but this is a perfectly legitimate and legal use of my bandwidth. I must just be a fringe case at this point, but it'll be interesting to see what happens when the collision hits for mainstream internet users between their bandwidth needs for always-improving online video and their bandwidth restrictions put in place by always-evil ISPs.

* Yes, I switched back to Jetbroadband recently after suffering one too many outages at the hands of NRV Unwired. While their speeds are still erratic at best, they seem to have fixed their system to only dip down as low as ~1.5Mb/sec during peak hours instead of being consistently below 56k, where it was a year ago. Just FYI for anyone else in Christiansburg.