February 10, 2004
Baseball on the Web
Nick Schulz comments in this post on baseball broadcasting on the internet. He points to this post by Dana Blankenhorn which was inspired by this C-Net article.
The bottom line is that MLB is looking for a web distributor for it's radio and television web broadcasts, and MLB wants lots of money up front to grant those rights. The distributors think this is unreasonable, and MLB may go off on it's own distribute content on the internet. Like Dana, I think that's just fine. Prove a subscription model can work. Prove an advertising model can work. Or find something that none of use have thought about. Nick's suggestion is that baseball use the internet as a way to get more fans watching the game, especially day games. Baseball was slow to adopt radio and TV, but both proved to increase the fan base. With that in mind, I believe Nick has the right strategy in mind.
Posted by David Pinto at
04:30 PM
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If I might make a suggestion, it would be good if baseball could use the Web to gain international fans.
But they won't at the pricing they are proposing to charge.
I liked they've used in the past. I didn't think the costs to the user were too high. I was a subscriber to the radio type service when it first hit the Internet a couple of years ago. I have refused to signup these last few years, despite the urge to, due to the requirement of installing the Real Player.
The Real Player is glorified adware/spyware. Whatever happens I hope MLB puts out a solution that I can use without the Real Player (WMP, QuickTime, whatever).
I really haven't minded RealPlayer for the past several years, and I've loved being able to listen to Giants games over the internet, as I live in the Midwest and otherwise would only have been able to catch them a few times a year. I hope they have something set up this year that allows me to continue to do so. And if they charge an arm and a leg, I might take the plunge on a satellite TV package instead of radio, but I'd prefer the internet radio.
MLB TV is $79.99 and essentially the same as direct tv except you have to watch on your computer with Real Player. I'll be getting it to see my A's this year.
Sean,
They're not exactly the same. First of all, the picture on the computer is a lot smaller. Second of all, the quality depends on your connection speed. When I was at work, which has a high speed line, the quality was superb. But when I'm at home, with a 384K DSL, I get about 1 frame per second. With DirecTV, you get a real television picture.
