Home MLB Web Pick of the Week: MLB.TV Free previews

Web Pick of the Week: MLB.TV Free previews

by Matt Smith

Web-PickFor the second straight year, baseball fans in Britian don’t have a free-to-air TV option when it comes to watching MLB. Your choices are either an ESPN America subscription (note that recent comments here have suggested that the standard ESPN channel is of no use to baseball fans) or taking the online option of an MLB.TV or Gameday Audio subscription from MLB.com

Regular readers will know that I am a devout MLB.TV fan. It’s not cheap as the standard subscription costs approximately £65 and you need to have a decent broadband package to make it useable, but if it came to the worst, I would cut most things out of my budget before not renewing my annual subscription.  The ability to watch any game live or on demand throughout the year is more than worth the price if you can find the money for it. 

One of the things that makes people wary of an online service rather than a traditional TV service is the unknown quantity of what the quality is going to be like.  That’s a valid point, particularly as your broadband package will have a bearing on this.  Other people also are unsure about watching games via their monitor and would like to know if they can set it up to run the picture through their TV.  Paying out for a subscription before finding out the answers to these questions is a big ask, so what you need is a free preview or two to give you the chance to trial it.

That’s exactly what MLB.com are providing over the next three days.  There are six exhibition games available to watch, with the games on Saturday and Sunday being the most convenient for us in the UK. Presumably you will also be able to trial the excellent Gameday Audio as well, which provides radio feeds for each game and is a cheaper, but no less enjoyable, option (it comes with the MLB.TV subscription and I use the audio feeds just as much as the video feeds). 

The media player has been updated this year and one of the main features for you to be aware of is the ‘quality’ bar which allows you to reduce the streaming quality of the picture.  Obviously, the greater the quality, the more bandwidth you use up and the more likely it is to splutter and stutter, so it’s worth playing around with that and seeing how far you can turn it down whilst maintaining a picture quality acceptable to you. I tend to set the picture to full screen and then sit a way back from my monitor when I watch games, which allows me to turn the quality down quite low (right to its lowest sometimes). The graphics are not crystal clear, but the main picture is perfectly watchable.

The six games are listed below with first pitches noted in British Summer Time. If you have any queries about using the MLB.TV service then leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help. 

Friday

23.10. Cardinals at Twins
00.05. (Sat.) Pirates at Phillies
03.05. (Sat.) Dodgers at Angels

Saturday

18.05. Pirates at Phillies
21.05. Red Sox at Nationals

Sunday

20.05. Mariners at Giants

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2 comments

Flynn April 2, 2010 - 5:00 pm

Something I would not hesitate to add is that because we’re in the UK, there are no blackouts. You can watch every single game from the 2010 season, including the playoffs and World Series, for US$119.99.

It’s almost 80 quid, which is not cheap, but when you consider the enormous amounts of games you can watch, we’re talking something like 40p a game. Just empty your pocket change every day and you’ll probably pay for your 2011 MLB.tv subscription.

Reply
Matt Smith April 2, 2010 - 10:04 pm

Very good point. The blackout rules are a bit crazy in the States, I read one comment today where the person lived the best part of 100 miles away from their local team and they can’t watch their games!

Reply

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