WebProNews

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’t matter if they can’t see it," MG Siegler said at VentureBeat.

(Microsoft clarifies: Although it was widely reported that Silverlight drives Mosaic's display, a Microsoft spokesperson said this is not the case. "MLB.TV offers three different download options for its subscribers to view content, one of which utilizes Silverlight (for a side by side view, please visit: http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/subscriptions/download.jsp). The issues you wrote about were associated with MLB.TV Mosaic, which is a C# application on the Windows platform and Java for the Mac but doesn’t use Silverlight." We apologize for the confusion.)

Fans posting to the MLB.TV Mosaic blog yesterday weren't nearly as gentle as Siegler. Outages cost fans the opportunity to enjoy Opening Day, which for Yankees fans will be the last one at The House That Ruth Built, Yankee Stadium.

Judging by the technical issues blogged by Mosaic leading up to Opening Day, the challenge of getting an ambitious MLB.TV rollout off the ground proved too daunting for the programmers and developers behind it.