MLB.TV 2011 review
This is predominantly aimed at baseball fans based in the UK or elsewhere outside of North America, as will become clear in the discussion of Blackout Regulations.
As baseball fans in the UK we are hit with a raw deal having to shell out for ESPN America (£12 per Month – £96 for the season from Spring Training to the World Series) and the choice of games is limited to around eight a week. The BBC 5live coverage is wonderfully done, but there’s only one game a week. Alternately though, you can get MLB.com’s magnificent MLB.TV.
I cannot recommend it more. I have been paying around £75 a year for it for the last three years (as a student this represents a significant portion of my budget), and it is certainly not cheap. But it is the value for money that makes it spectacular.
There are two subscription types Standard and Premium. The difference in price is around £10.
The basic features are live feeds of all games, on demand viewing soon after, live and on demand radio feeds, and an archive of all games back to 2006. The picture quality is usually good even on a pretty poor connection, such as mine. On a good connection, with MLB.com’s Nexdef plugin downloaded (free, if you ask) you can get it in fantastic HD. The player itself is a joy to use, with a list of games down one side, meaning that all MLB games of a night are just a click away. You can set it to track players and flash up when they are coming up to bat, and you can get highlights in a picture in picture box to stay up to date with things as they happen.
This is just the Standard package. For Premium you get the following extra features:
The option of home or away broadcast, as opposed to the standard home broadcast you get with standard;
You can split the screen of the player in to up to four games at once; and
You are able to (I really like this) superimpose radio commentary over the live game images.
Unless, like me, you are an absolute baseball nut, or just like Jon Miller’s voice over the pictures of Giants games. Or if you want to hear you teams regular announcers when they are on the road, I would probably say that the extra features of Premium are not necessarily worth the extra cash you have to fork out for them.
Occasionally one encounters problems with jerkiness in the feed, but this can be quickly sorted out by justifying the quality. MLB.TV works with all browsers, albeit particularly well with Google Chrome (in my experience). They will also offer you a bundle deal for MILB.TV for an extra £7.
In the US, MLB.TV is fraught with blackout restrictions making it a waste of money if you are buying it there, to follow your local team. However, for those of us unlucky enough to be separated from the majors by a large expanse of water, we do have the luck to not suffer in any way from Blackouts. Even postseason games are not blacked out. And it is in this that the true value for money lies, a subscription to MLB.TV for the British baseball fan represents a ticket, as it were, to any game played in the current (and last five) season(s) around the majors.
Overall then, if you have not yet discovered this brilliant way to watch baseball, or you have up untill now been put off by the price tag, I would say that there is no reason not to get it if you have a more than casual interest in baseball. As that level of interest is well served by the few games offered on BBC 5Live. Especially if baseball is the only US sport you follow, MLB.TV works out at about the same price as ESPN/ESPN America but with (obviously), considerably more baseball content. And content of a high quality and with several excellent features.
Content courtesy of CharlesJS