MLB.TV Strikes Out Again

Online baseball games offline for second day

By WebProNews Staff · April 2, 2008 · 9 Comments

Major League Baseball’s online television offering goes down swinging again and leaves its subscribers without their national pastime fix.

Problems that cropped up on baseball’s US opening day, as opposed to the two games in Japan a week ago, returned again for MLB.TV. Inlet Technologies provides the Spinnaker technology that powers Mosaic, but they shouldn’t expect anything but high heat from angry premium MLB.TV subscribers.

The Mosaic team for MLB.TV posted the unhappy news on Tuesday, but viewers have suffered through a couple of days of outages, as VentureBeat noted.

Microsoft also picked up an indirect black eye, as MLB tapped their Silverlight technology to couple with Mosaic and deliver an improved video experience. “This partnership was to bring higher quality video to users – which of course doesn

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There are 9 Comments. Add Yours.

Guest
April 6, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Reply

They had all winter and spring training to test out the new system. MLB.TV worked for me all spring training then failed on March 29th. Just really poor planning all the way around.
Bob Johnson
April 3, 2008 at 11:28 am
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To make it worse, MLB continues to flunk Customer Service 101. They will not respond to messages and have not posted an explanation on the website.

They should be proactively posting advisories on the MLB website re the problems and processing bill credits. Instead, they tell consumers nothing and continue to sell the product to new unsuspectding subscribers, even though it does not work.
- Kevin Anderson
  April 3, 2008 at 12:03 pm
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  I agree that there may be issues with lengthy wait times on the phone and such (I had one over 45 minutes), but they deserve props when it comes to Mosaic troubleshooting. The entire time around opening day they had a support blog updated. It may be frustrating but they do push the envelope technologically and are at least accessible for Mosaic issues – http://mosaic.mlblogs.com/
Geoffrey Thomas
April 3, 2008 at 10:13 am
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The Mosaic application is not using (and has never used) Silverlight. That technology is only used in MLB.com’s media player and embedded site video. Please get the facts correct before issuing a black eye to Microsoft.
- David A. Utter
  April 3, 2008 at 10:33 am
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  Mosaic has Silverlight in it. MLB offers a standalone Silverlight player, but the pay version of MLB.TV includes Silverlight. You may be confused by the three different options MLB has on the page in question.
  
  Google cache of Microsoft’s announcement about Silverlight and MLB from last year.
  - Geoffrey Thomas
    April 3, 2008 at 11:59 am
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    That is correct that MLB.TV uses Silverlight, but you are wholly inaccurate in saying that the only paid product is Mosaic. That is the top-of-line offering to premium subscribers. The MLB.TV paid product resides on two levels – the standalone media player powered by Silverlight and MLB.TV Mosaic which does not use Silverlight.
    - David A. Utter
      April 3, 2008 at 1:35 pm
      Reply
      
      I never said the only paid product is Mosaic.
      - Geoffrey Thomas
        April 3, 2008 at 3:36 pm
        
        You referenced Silverlight globally on the MLB.TV paid product and that’s factually incorrect. Silverlight is not used on Mosaic and even more so there is nothing in that press release that says Mosaic uses Silverlight.
      - Guest
        April 8, 2008 at 2:23 pm
        
        It really does not matter how silverlight works in this mess. All we know is that when this application was based on Realplayer, it worked everyday.