MLB.tv

[rudel.dietrich]

I am very happy with the service so far. I can watch games in HD with very little lag. If I watch a game live I usualy pause the game for the first 10 minutes or so and let the game 'spool up' and then unpause the game and it plays fine for the rest of the game with no freezing.
I watch most of my games the day after in archived formed and the downloading is quick and freeze free.
The HD is true 720P and looks fantastic on a 27" monitor.

[Erik W.]

I've been happy with the service as well. All of the Cardinals games have looked really good despite me limiting the quality to the fourth bar. We get our business internet service installed Friday (which is the only way to get unlimited bandwidth with our provider) so then I'll get to watch games in their full HD glory.

My only complaint so far has been with their CS. I made the mistake of deciding that the $15 I paid for Gameday Audio before deciding to get MLB.TV was worth pursuing a refund on, and the chain of e-mails that have ensued have shown a shocking lack of reading comprehension skills by their CS people. I'm still not sure how this is going to end.

[Joe Canadian]

So I purchased the premium version at lunch time Wednesday, and all the afternoon & night games worked fine. I've been using my XP-based media server to watch the games, as I've had a bunch of papers to finish on my Mac, so I haven't really had a chance to test it on that yet.

Everything was working. Now if I go into full screen (again this is on XP, in Chrome, Firefox, IE & using Flash 9 & 10) after about 2 minutes the game freezes, both audio & video, and Flash just stops working. Everything works fine in windowed mode. I've checked out the support forums, and this seems to be an issue a lot of people are having, so I'm curious if any of you are having the same problems.

From the sounds of it, the issue is with the NextDef plug-in that premium users need to take advantage of HD. Uninstall it, and everything is fine, but then you're not getting what you payed for. You can also go into the Flash settings and turn off hardware acceleration, but that drops quality as well. For now I'm using the second option, until they release an update for that plug-in.

Other than that rather huge problem, everything else is cool. I rarely drop below full bars. Switching between views, PIP, PIP swap, jumping between innings... all that works without a hitch. Hopefully they get the plug-in fixed ASAP, as it really is a great service...

On a brighter note... I also purchased the MLB At Bat iPhone app, and that works perfectly so far. I listend to 90% of the Yankees game this afternoon while at work, switching between the home & away feeds without a hitch. The one thing I'd point out is that streaming audio to your phone for around 3 hours really eats up the iPhone's battery.

The one thing they could do to improve it is to allow you to jump out of the app itself by linking you to a quicktime compatible feed in Safari. Since you can't run apps in the backrground on the iPhone, if you want to exit the app (check e-mail, write a txt message, etc.) the audio stops. There's a few radio applications that do the Safari/Quicktime workaround, but you're not paying for those feeds, so I'm not sure how that would work with At Bat.

Anyways... I'll let you know how it goes over the next few days. And if anyone else is or isn't having similar problems let me know.

[PurdueBrad]

MLB.TV is something I never thought I would purchase but the price is reasonable (IMHO) and as a Pirate and Red Sox fan living in Chicago, I don't get a huge opportunity to see my teams. This has been really cool.

I've only had one service problem and that was that the site was having trouble figuring out my location for blackout restrictions. I called, was on hold for maybe 5 minutes, and a guy came on, got my IP, set me up and have had no problems since. So far...so good.

[koohead]

Is there a "strikezone channel" feature? What I loved about the Extra Innings package last year was teh strikezone channel...they would hop in and out of games automatically. I didn't have to channel surf.
MLB network tries to do this, but theirs just way too much studio gabbing for my tastes.

[SWardle]

My question is, can you port it to your TV? I know you can take a DVI to HDMI cable and move the video over to your TV. But what about sound. Is there a cheap and easy way to send the sound from the computer to the TV as well?

If so, what kind of video quality does it have? I've always been intrigued by MLB.tv but I'm not too keen about sitting at my computer desk watching baseball, either. I'd like to lounge back on the couch and watch baseball.

[Joe Canadian]

Originally Posted by koohead

Is there a "strikezone channel" feature? What I loved about the Extra Innings package last year was teh strikezone channel...they would hop in and out of games automatically. I didn't have to channel surf.
MLB network tries to do this, but theirs just way too much studio gabbing for my tastes.

There's a player tracker feature where you add players to your account, and when they are at bat you get a pop-up so you can switch to that game. You also get pop-ups when big plays happen in other games, instant highlights if you will.

I'm not sure what the "strikezone channel" is, so I couldn't tell you if it's there.

Originally Posted by SWardle

My question is, can you port it to your TV? I know you can take a DVI to HDMI cable and move the video over to your TV. But what about sound. Is there a cheap and easy way to send the sound from the computer to the TV as well?

This really depends on your set-up. What ports are on your TV, how are they arranged (for example one of my four HDMI ports & my VGA port are paired with 3.5 mm audio ports), do you have a separate audio system?

If you need L\R audio jacks to plug into your system, you can buy cables that go from the 3.5mm headphone jack on your computer to the L/R audio jacks you'd find on TV's. The one I have only cost $5 at Radio Shack.