Major League Baseball: watching your TV on your laptop is THEFT

[TehBorken]

 [h3]Major League Baseball: watching [span style="text-decoration: underline;"]your[/span] TV on [span style="text-decoration: underline;"]your[/span] laptop is "theft"  
[/h3]Major League Baseball, a sports organization that backed the Broadcast Flag, has publicly denounced technologies like Slingbox that let you watch your TV on your laptop over the net. Slingbox lets you retransmit the programs being received on your home set wherever you are in the world. An MLB spokesman called this theft. Industry watchers predict that MLB will start suing the companies that make these soon -- but what will they do about open source PVRs like Mythtv that do the same thing without having a formal organization that they can haul into court? [blockquote][A] cable subscriber in San Francisco who watches a Giants baseball game from his or her laptop during a visit to Chicago is stealing from the Chicago cable operator who paid to transmit MLB games in that city. But we're not talking Napster here, argues Buchanan. The cable subscriber in such a scenario already purchased the content from a programmer back home and under the law can watch it wherever he or she chooses, he said. [/p]"Your interpretation of the (cable and satellite user agreement) is wrong," Kliavkoff told Buchanan as the two spoke before some 200 conference attendees. Sling Media users "are violating the scope of their user agreements." [/p][/blockquote]  [a href="vny!://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6080665.html"]Link[/a]    

[Dissident]

  I used to have season tickets to the Giants.

When I moved North I listened to KNBR online for free for a few years to catch Giants games.

Then MLB got in on the act, and charged a $5 access fee for the season to online feeds.  The following season it was $10, and the year after that it went up to $15.   For a couple of years after they jacked it up to $15 they gave you an online gift certificate to MLB.com (cool, except for the fact that you still pay almost 100% duty to addresses in Canada, even on Blue Jays merch).  They don't give you anything now.

Meanwhile, as everything was controlled out of St Paul, MLB just put a 3-hour timer on the game--which meant that if the game was rain delayed or went into extra innings the feed would cut off.  For night games, that was after midnight in the Midwest, and the support people had mostly gone to bed.

On top of that, KNBR's "regular" online feed would go off during all the pregame shows (with an announcement that the programming was licenced to MLB), but the MLB feed wouldn't start until right before game time.  Similarly, the post-game wrap (nice if you get home real late and miss most of the game but want to hear what you missed) wasn't carried on MLB.com, but you couldn't hear it from KNBR because it was licenced to MLB.

They finally sorted it all out last season, but they're constantly changing their hardware and software requirements and I end up making lengthy calls to them (not toll-free from Canada) to get the feeds to work properly at least twice at the beginning of the season.

MLB.com deserves to have their feeds hijacked.  If you can watch on Slingbox. all power to you.

Besides, if you have a credit card with an out-of-market billing address you can still watch even the blacked-out feeds.

It used to be easy to get Giants games on cable--even here in BC--but they're fewer and further between.  Meanwhile, since the new ballpark was built, it costs an arm and a leg to actually go to the game (plus $8 beers and $3 bottles of water at the park).

I'm sure it's the same in all markets, especially places like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, where they've built new ballparks recently.

Meanwhile, baseball is losing audience in North America.  They need to get a clue.