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.