Watching baseball online is hard, even if you want to pay for it. Before we talk about that, though, I should tell you: I’m a Red Sox fan. So, while the last few years have been a pleasure (I’m looking at you 2004 and 2007), this year didn’t turn out so good. On the other hand, had the Sox made it to the series, this experiement would have gotten a whole lot more interesting.
But back to the topic at hand: watching baseball online. Trying to understand the rights for live broadcast of Major League Baseball is not a simple task (there’s an entire Wikipedia page devoted to it), and it gets even more complicated once you factor in the local sports networks like NESN and MASN. To make a long story short, Major League Baseball is broadcast on ESPN, TBS and FOX. This year, the World Series is on FOX (the ALCS was on TBS). None of these stations actually own the content, they have a deal with Major League Baseball to get the feeds of the shows (regular season games are produced by the local sports networks, I’m not sure how the post season works).
Going to The Majors
So, no luck going to FOX, TBS or ESPN. All you’ll get are clips and highlights. The place to go is Major League Baseball itself, which offers MLB.TV. The good news is, with a subscription, you can watch the games live; there’s just one catch: you have to be outside the United States, since MLB sold the exclusive broadcast rights to FOX. This international package costs $9.95. For US fans, you can listen live over the web, and get an archived version of the game about 45 minutes after the game is over. This package costs $4.95. This is all less than exciting for the US baseball afficianado. A full detail of MLB’s online offerings is available on their website.
It’s Two Outs, Bottom of the Ninth, Bases Loaded. What Do You Do?
So what’s left, if you want live baseball? Audio isn’t bad, but it’s not ideal. MLB.com offers something called MLB Live (you can find it from just about any page on MLB.com), a streaming channel with commentary during games. Not that exciting. I suppose the tech-savvy US resident could bounce through a foreign proxy server and buy the international package (but that would break the No More TV rule of not doing anything illegal to watch a show).
I’m not going to use the traditional rankings as we used for The Office (and will use on other serial shows), since they don’t make a whole lot of sense in this context; this post is more of an exploration in how to get live video, or even audio, of Major League Baseball, and isn’t really a full exploration of what can be done with footage after the game has aired, archives, etc. We’ll cover all of that in another post. I do give credit to Major League Baseball for putting together MLB.TV; there is no reason why they should give their stuff away, and the prices are very reasonable. I’m a little peeved about the US blackouts, I understand that they have to do this in order to get the big bucks from the networks, but it’s a shame.
Overall, I give Major League Baseball a C+ for their online efforts, since the games are available to watch after the fact, you can listen live, but there is no way to watch live, and I don’t really want to watch a game afterwards, especially if I know how it ended; that’s what Sportscenter is for.
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Geoff 10.28.08 at 1:20 pm
Why not make a small compromise and get your World Series fix with the over the air digital broadcast (assuming you can get reception). I have a EyeTV tuner in my 24 inc iMac and it works great (when reception is good).