MLB.TV Strikes Out on Opening Day

Anon

Contributor Written on April 07, 2009

HOUSTON - APRIL 06: Milton Bradley #21 of the Chicago Cubs flips over after missing a fly ball against the Houston Astros on Opening Day on April 6, 2009 at Minute Maid Park in Houston, Texas. The Cubs defeated the Astros 4-2. (Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

(Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

Yesterday evening, middle European summer time, I rushed home from work...

Finally after months of waiting, Opening Day and many new techno-goodies promised by MLB.TV...

Powered up my computer and chose to watch Mets @ Reds, followed by the Pirates @ Cardinals before finally turning to my beloved Cubbies...

At about 3:00 AM, I finally went to bed feeling rather disgusted. I hadn't managed to watch more than five minutes at a stretch without some major glitch, frozen video, out of sync audio. I spent more time installing and re-installing the software prerequisites for MLB.TV Premium, testing the bandwidth between my computer and the streaming servers and surfing the support forum at mlb.com in a vain attempt to figure out what was going wrong.

And I was not the only one. As the evening progressed more and more complaints were being logged and MLB-support answers became rarer and rarer. It became rather obvious that the MLB servers and/or the NexDef system from Swarmcast had suffered a serious melt down. Even now more than 16 hours later, the many of games are still not available. The archives are supposed to be on-line c. 45 minutes after the last out.

The weirdest thing is that the MLB appears to be living in Cloud Cuckoo Land instead of being honest and forthright about what happened: "MLB.TV, season off to flying starts" <http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090405&content_id=4132698&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb>.

Yep, MLB you gotta learn how to walk before you learn how to run. Oh, and hire some Internet savvy tech people and competent programmers.

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written on April 07, 2009 Opinion

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