MLB.TV is Rendered Impotent by Blackout Restrictions
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009The traditional model of broadcast television is becoming obsolete. More and more people get TV shows, news, and weather from their computers and mobile devices. In fact, the very definition of “TV show” is getting muddled by sites like Hulu and the iTunes Store.
It’s clear that, when given the option, many people choose to watch content originally intended for their television on a variety of other devices. Lately, I’ve been treating my television like a computer display. I stream Netflix movies to it and connect my computer to watch downloaded programs and video podcasts. Sure, the technology isn’t seamless, but with each generation of hardware and software, it gets easier and more intuitive.
Live televised events, specifically sports, lag behind the time-shifting power of downloaded episodes on a computer, iPod, or mobile device. But that’s not entirely surprising. There are bandwidth costs to deal with, and the actual technology needed to deliver a live, scalable, high-quality video to millions of viewers online hasn’t quite been perfected yet.
However, it gets exponentially better every year. The National Football League experimented with streaming select games last season. I watched a few Sunday Night Football games online, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the video quality was very good. There were some nice extra features, like the ability to switch camera views to different players and parts of the field.
But there were plenty of problems, too. The video player was plagued by an obscene amount of ads, some that even interrupted plays in progress. I must have seen the same Sprint commercial a hundred times. Sometimes the stream suffered from dropped connections, video and audio didn’t always quite sync up, and the few games the NFL streamed online were also available for free, over the air, in full HD. It was a neat experiment, but there was no real advantage to streaming the game online.
Enter Major League Baseball, with an impressive set of features in its MLB.TV service this year. In addition to streaming every baseball game live on their service, they’re offering HD-quality video, DVR functionality, multi-game viewing, picture-in-picture, live game radio, and a player tracker for fantasy baseball updates. The service costs $106 for the season, or $20 monthly.
If MLB actually delivered all these features as advertised, it would be a killer product. Unfortunately, your local team’s live games will most likely be unavailable to you.
Here in the city limits of Baltimore, the only way to watch all of the Orioles games is to subscribe to Comcast, which carries the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network. Not all of the games are broadcast over the air, so we’re forced to pay for cable if we want to watch the entire season. For someone like me who loves baseball but doesn’t have cable, I’d happily pay the $20 each month to MLB.TV to watch my beloved Orioles, for access to the other games across the league, and the player tracker to keep tabs on my fantasy lineup. That’s much cheaper than a monthly cable bill, and it gives me exactly the content I want.
Sadly, the great features advertised on MLB.TV clash with the rules and contracts of old-school television. Because of local exclusivity contracts, there are massive blackout restrictions that ruin what would otherwise be the perfect service for a baseball lover.
If I signed up for MLB.TV, I’d be able to get regular season games except for the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals.
Games will be available for viewing 45 minutes after they’re over, but what’s the fun of that? The service is useless for anyone who lives near their favorite team. It’s a stupid, obsolete practice that must be re-thought if the product is to thrive while Internet and television continue to converge.
The blackout restrictions force customers to sign up with cable or satellite providers, the only source for national games on ESPN and many local feeds of home teams. During the postseason, all games will be blacked out online in the United States. Your $106 doesn’t even grant you live access to the most exciting part of the season.
There are other really weird blackout conditions that make it seem as if they’re purposefully making MLB.TV an impotent, useless service, unavailable when you would want to use it most. From the fine print at the bottom of this page comes this gem:
Regular Season Weekend U.S. National Live Blackout: Due to Major League Baseball exclusivities, live games occurring each Saturday with a scheduled start time after 1:10 PM ET or before 7:05 PM ET and each Sunday with a scheduled start time after 5:00 PM ET, will be blacked out in the United States (including the territories of Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands). Live Audio of such games is available as part of any MLB.TV subscription or as part of the MLB.com Gameday Audio Package. Each game will be available 45 minutes after the conclusion of the game as an archived game (archived games are blackout free).
Do you want to kick back and watch some out-of-market weekend baseball? Odds are, you’ll run into difficulty even with that at some point this season with MLB.TV.
Why is there such a disconnect here? Why would Major League Baseball go to the trouble and expense of building a feature-rich, high-quality service, and then disable the features that would make it attractive to the majority of baseball fans?
If you don’t live in the same city as your favorite team, if you don’t care about watching weekend games, and if you’re pretty sure your team won’t make it to the playoffs, then maybe MLB.TV would be a good service for you.
It’s as frustrating as it is idiotic. I can’t be the only fan ready and willing to shell out $106 for a season of unrestricted baseball, and MLB is refusing my money. Wouldn’t it be a win-win-win for the networks, local cable channels, and MLB? More subscribers means more revenue that can be paid out to the networks and local affiliates. More subscribers means more eyeballs on ad spots during the game, in turn making those advertising spots more valuable. Everyone makes more money, everyone gets a bigger audience, and the audience gets all the content they want. Everyone ends up happy.
Except for the cable and satellite providers. So the sticking point might be with them. Since they’re the only ones that stand to lose money, perhaps Comcast and the others strong-armed their way into contracts and obsolete agreements with MLB. However, the cable providers are generally the same companies that provide broadband connections to sports fans that would access MLB.TV, so wouldn’t they still reap a profit?
This old way of doing business has to stop, and it has to stop soon. MLB has created a service with the potential to be revolutionary, but the out-of-date business model puts it behind barriers that make its core selling point inaccessible to the majority of customers and fans.
In order to stay relevant, let alone compete, blackout restrictions must be lifted from MLB.TV and the entire advertised service must be made available to all customers, regardless of geographic location.
When companies divorce themselves from outdated business models associated with traditional media and update their practices to embrace new technology rather than resist it, they’ll be the ones to usher in a new age of content delivery and re-shape the way consumers get (and pay for) programming. If not, the entire industry will continue to stagnate and eventually choke to death on its own ineptitude.
