FANS BEWARE!
If you’re a baseball fan like me you might have signed up – impulse buy – for MLB’s Postseason.tv package. Frankly I would rather have flushed a $10 bill down the toilet for the novelty of the moment, rather than endure the frustrations of launching this service.
The image above shows you what you get, more or less. And when you’re thinking about buying the service you probably see splashy windows or slick features designed to empty your wallet. But then you notice things. And pretty quickly, because they’re important to the function of watching baseball. Like there’s no HUD. No balls-strikes count, no inning, no mini box score, no nothing. There’s no information to assist you as a watcher.
Of course you could also launch their “gameday” feature, which will give you all of that information. But then you’d require a second monitor if you wanted to watch the game proper fullscreen! Or there are these other buttons for “highlights”, “summary” etc that show you the information you want, but it overlays over the actual game! So you miss the game if you’re trying to look for information to help you with watching the game!
Now they try and sell you with the “create your own experience” angle. With each stadium there are around 6-12 cameras to choose from that you can pump to your screen. Of course, they don’t tell you sometimes your screen will be flooded with tech garble:
Fuck the what!?
And no matter how many times I hit that flipping “SYNC” button it never works:
note Clayton Kershaw in his delivery in the bottom-left, but with Martin already approaching the mound in the top right.
Furthermore they’re pumping you the TBS audio, but the video is not the TBS national television broadcast. So sometimes the announcers are talking about things that are being shown for a television audience, but as a web-user you’re clueless.
And oh yeah, that yellow bounding box around the selected video – scroll back up to the header image to see what I’m talking about – there’s no way to get that yellow box to disappear!
This thread over at mlbsupport shows the frustrations that so many users have had with purchasing this postseason package.
Fans beware!
So your “major league frustrations” involve annoyance with MLB.com, but nary a mention of the Card’s dismal post-season performance?
Because my “major league frustration” was Holliday dropping that fucking ball.
Hi Nick! I almost bought this before the playoffs started. Given what I’ve heard about it since – and what happened to the home team – I’m really glad I didn’t.
@Josh, yeah it was dismal. but such is the game of baseball. Hey, at least we’re not the Cubs! LOL!
@Jason, Hey! You definitely saved yourself some aggravation. Consider yourself $10 richer too!