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.
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Comments
They had all winter and
MLB outage
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.
I agree that there may be
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/
MLB.TV
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.
Nope
Google cache of Microsoft's announcement about Silverlight and MLB from last year.
Wrong Again
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.
Huh?
Clarity
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.
It really does not matter
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.
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