Microsoft and Major League Baseball have announced that the MLB.TV app is available today on Xbox LIVE. The app allows you to watch live HD broadcasts of every out-of-market regular season game, as well as archived games and highlights from every game (in-market or out).

The app includes an impressive array of viewing options. A mini guide at the bottom of the screen allows you to watch one game and keep up with other games being played at the same time. The mini guide also lets you to switch quickly and easily between games. The app also includes split screen viewing so that you can watch two games at once. Viewing options for each screen vary, so you can have two live games going, or a live game and a recap, or a live game and an archive game, or whatever combination of live game, archive game, and recap you choose.

You can also choose your favorite teams, so that they are displayed first on the schedule screen and the mini guide. The app also has DVR functionality, letting you pause and rewind at will. What’s more, the app is Kinect compatible, meaning that you can navigate the app using gestures and voice commands.

The MLB.TV app is free, however an Xbox LIVE Gold membership is required. Watching live games also requires an MLB.TV Premium subscription, which will set you back $124.99 for the whole season, or $24.99 per month. You can still use the app if you’re not an MLB.TV subscriber, but you’ll be limited to checking scores and watching recaps, archive games, and the free game of the day (which may or may not involve a team you’re interested in watching).

It’s worth emphasizing that the MLB.TV service (whether you watch it on Xbox, your iPhone, Roku, or whatever) only gets you out-of-market games. If you live inside the broadcast area for your local team, their games will be blacked out. That also goes for games broadcast nationally on ESPN, FOX, TBS, etc. Even if you don’t have the cable channel on which your team’s games are broadcast, if you’re in the area, you’re blacked out. If, on the other hand, you live outside your team’s home market (case in point: I’m a Red Sox fan living in Kentucky), then MLB.TV is pretty awesome, and while there are MLB.TV apps/channels on a variety of platforms, the Xbox LIVE version appears to be one of the more feature-rich examples.

Are you glad to be getting MLB.TV on your Xbox? Are you an MLB.TV subscriber? Tell us what you think in the comments.