MLB.TV is fan unfriendly

To be fair, I didn't try to watch any of the games last nights, so it might be better now -- fat chance!

Anyway, I had some problems with MLB.TV (the spawn of satan) on Tuesday night and it turns out I wasn't the only one.

Major League Baseball's MLB.TV online broadcasting service encountered serious technical difficulties for the second straight day on Tuesday, as affected paying subscribers fumed about missing games.

At around 7 p.m. Eastern Time, minutes prior to the start of Tuesday's first games, MLBdisabledits Mosaic media player, the application that gives premium-level MLB.TV subscribers the advanced viewing features they pay for.

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 In an interview Tuesday, Robert Bowman, president and CEO of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, MLB's interactive media and Internet company, acknowledged that MLB.TV has had technical glitches at the start of prior seasons.

But he said that the MLB.TV team does its best to have the system ready under difficult circumstances. "It's a complicated process. We can't get into the ballparks and test things out until we actually have games in the ballparks, so we have a one-day spring training" for testing everything end to end, he said.

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For example, in addition to upgrading Mosaic using Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application technology...

So let me get this right, they didn't test anything in advance and trusted Microsoft to produce a quality bug-free product.  What are they....morons?!

If you installed Sliverlight, my recommendation to you is to uninstall it, at least the streaming started working for me when I did.  Sure the quality of the picture wasn't anything to write home about, but you could at least see it.

If you are out of market and want an alternative to wrestling with MLB.TV, you could always go the slingbox route.  However, this will require you to find a buddy in the market area who will have the game on their television and willing to transmit to you over the internet.  Also, you will have to pay for the equipment and have it shipped to your new buddy.  Should he or she not be home and their 10-year old wants to watch Nick at Nite, you are out of luck.

If we need to buddy up, let me know and we will start seeing what we can do.