Baseball Fans Must Pay To Listen Online

blair1q writes: "The AP is reporting that MLB and RealNetworks have formed a cartel to embargo broadcasts of baseball games, charging listeners $9.99 for the season. No word on whether they will continue to broadcast the commercials along with the games. No word on whether you will be forced to pay $29.95 for a registered copy of RealNetworks' software. No word on whether RealNetworks will improve the quality and reliability, or MLB will guarantee availability of the feeds, or you can move from machine to machine with your access intact. The words 'suck' and 'criminal' want to appear here in the worst way." Especially after team owners extort taxpayers to help build their stadiums. Of course, pay-per-view events aren't new, but pay-per-listen sports broadcasting? Webcams, laptops and Ricochet (in participating cities) seem appropriate.

freebies

Do you at least get a baseball cap or bat with your purchase?

actually, no...

Major League Baseball was granted an exemption from antitrust laws by congress.

There's this great thing...

...called a radio. It's really cool. You can listen to sports broadcasts on the go, or sit back and listen to some tunes! You can even be intellectually stimulated by some talk radio! Think of the possibilities!
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I don't see any problems with this.

I'm usually in the minority on things like this, but I think it's pretty irresponsible to assume the worst about something like this.

Sports broadcasts are usually paid for by radio stations which then recoup the expense through ad sales. Assuming the $9.95/season gives you the rights to listen to every game, sans-ads, how is this "unethical", "criminal" or "immoral"?

Why is the slashdot community so vehemently opposed to companies making money through honest means? This stuff costs money. Deal with it.

Re:freebies

No, but it does include the audio-only swimsuit edition.

cartel?

Don't like it, don't buy it. That simple. Or are you implying that this service is evil and we should crush it under a torrent of flamebait posts, which won't weigh on real networks any heavier than a slightly uncomfortable hat?

If something's broadcasted over the net, someone has to pay for it, and it's surely not going to be them. They are trying to make money offering streaming, a unpopular thing at slashdot but a necessary thing none the less.

If you look

here [realnetworks.com] you will see that this does in fact require the "Gold Pass" service. And that yes [real.com] you do in fact have to have the non-free player to use the gold pass service.

There's value in MLB coverage

I'm not a big MLB fan, so I'm probably less concerned about this than I would be if it was a different issue, but let's be realistic.

This is entertainment, and people will pay a large amount of money for entertainment. MLB is in business to make money while entertaining.

If people want MLB coverage, and it's offered for a fee, then they can pay the fee or not get the entertainment.

In many ways this is analagous to cable carrying local TV stations. "Why would I pay for what I can get for free?"

Because picture quality and signal strength are much better, that's why. Don't like it? Get out the rabbit ears.

So, WRT MLB for a fee...Don't want to pay? Find free entertainment.

Free MLB is not a right guaranteed by the constitution. Deal with it.

Regards,
Anomaly

PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you.

If you would like to know more about this, please email me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com.

Re:If it's not on radio

Yeah, I'm a Yankees fan transplanted in Minnesota - If I could pay $10 for a season of games, I'd love it - with this hopefully the coverage will be better, since not all the games were net broadcast last year. I just hope there would be some type of QoS agreement - audio for a game is pretty low bandwidth (and great for daytime (worktime) games), but if you get into the video feeds, there needs to be some minimal quality, or it isn't worth it (baseball is a great game to listen to on radio, if the announcers are worth their salt).

$10... that's just over $0.06/game if you listen to all of your favorite team's games... not too shabby... for those that listen to even more, a real bonus.
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9 bucks for the entire season is not so bad

look at it this way, it's probably aimed primarily at people who are located outside of the broadcast area of the team they are interested in, e.g., NY Yankee fans living in California. Satellite TV season sports packages easily cost upwards of 100 dollars per season, if not more. People living within the broadcast market will just watch Tv/listen to the radio. Even if I were on a business trip and wanted to catch the action of the latest home team's game, 9 bucks is quite reasonable even for a one time fee, heck that's about how much it costs for a couple of pr0n flicks in a hotel pay-per-view. As far as commercials go, in baseball it's not even an issue considering they have commercial breaks anyway between innings. It's a pity it won't be free anymore but servers and bandwidth cost money. I think 9 bucks is a pretty reasonable price.

Re:actually, no...

Not quite. In 1922, the Supreme Court held [findlaw.com] that insofar as the federal antitrust laws apply only to interstate commerce, baseball is beyond the reach of those laws, because a baseball game is played in only one state at a time. (If you think this is peculiar reasoning, you are not alone. Legal scholars generally agree that this is one of the worst opinions Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. ever wrote, the other major contender being a case in which a woman was permitted to be sterilized [findlaw.com] because she had a low IQ.)

Congress has "granted" baseball an exemption insofar as it has not corrected the Supreme Court's decision, a decision which subsequent Supreme Court cases have treated as binding though they have more or less acknowledged that the original decision was wrong.

Re:I don't see any problems with this.

I agree. MLB sells the rights to baseball games to broadcasters, who either telecast for pay (on cable) or for free (on the air). So they have come up with a way to offer internet rights to another "network" (Real).

Sounds perfectly normal to me!

New Slashdot Stories (Almighty Buck category)

Coming soon, to inspire your anger and fury:

- Restaurants Charge For Food, Require Additional Charge for Coffee and Alcoholic Beverages

- Money-Grubbing ISPs Charge More for High-Bandwidth Lines, Even Though They're Used for Napster, Gnutella, and Freenet

- ThinkGeek Charges Hundreds for MP3 Players, which are Critical to Your Rights Online

I know, it's shocking. But it's true!

Re:There's this great thing...

Yup, I remember recently i was trying to listen to the Maryland-Duke game, and I tried for an hour or so installing software, searching for a web broadcast. Eventually i foudn a local station rebroadcasing using realplayer and when i downloaded the feed it said "this broadcast has been remved at the request of the rights holder". I was bummed for awhile, but then i realized that I HAD A RADIO! so i just tuned in, took 30 seconds, no software liscences, no installs, no stupid copy control. If this technology were new, people would be slobbering over it. Sometimes the old solution is the best.

Works Like This in Meatspace Too...

Basically we're at the point now where web sports broadcasts are like meatspace sports broadcasts. In meatspace, if you want the broadcasts for your home team, you can more or less do it on local radio or local television for free. If you want to watch out-of-town games, you pay for cable or satellite access so you can watch games on ESPN or DirecTV or whatever. I mean, come on... (as other posters have noted) if you only want to hear your home team's games... why are you getting it over the web anyway? Just turn on the radio. :)

You have to remember how this works from a business perspective. No matter how many people listen to a radio broadcast, it costs the station the same amount of money to broadcast it. That's NOT the case with a RealAudio broadcast because each user consumes additional bandwidth and additional CPU time on the broadcaster's side!

Still, it would be nice if we could get to the point where online advertisers and businesses could have deals where the advertisers basically pay per online viewer... that way hopefully as the amount of users increases, the amount of ad revenue would increase at the same rate as the bandwidth/cpu costs and then maybe online broadcasts could be free again? I think the only thing holding this back as cluelessness/skittishness on the part of the advertisers....


http://www.bootyproject.org [bootyproject.org]

Re:actually, no...

> Not quite. In 1922, the Supreme Court held that insofar as the federal antitrust laws apply only to interstate commerce, baseball is beyond the reach of those laws, because a baseball game is played in only one state at a time.

REUTERS, May 18, 2039.

A constitutional crises is brewing after yesterday's game in the new Texarkana Civic Stadium, after slugger Binko Rutherford hit a homer that not only went over the fence, but also across the state line. The Supreme Court is meeting in an emergency session to reconsider the merits of its 1922 ruling on the status of baseball vis-a-vis federal anti-trust laws.

The stakes in this decision are unusually high, as the team owners are threatening to secede from the union if their traditional priviledged status is reversed.

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Adventures in Sports Logic

Here in Arizona I've been watching with some amusement (though mostly annoyance) how sports broadcasts are distributed.

In the Fall, they will not broadcast the local football team locally, or on cable. Your only option to view the game is in person, at a sports bar, or using the Sunday Ticket on the sat. These are the options for me to view a game that is being played less then a mile from my apartment. I can, however, listen to the game live on the net, or watch games from other parts of the country on TV. (But somehow it looses something when I can hear fireworks outside my window and then wait 45 seconds or so to find out what happened on the net broadcast).

Now that it's basketball season, I can watch most away games on broadcast TV, but can only see home games if I subsribe to cable (home games are shown on a special Cox channel). Any other broadcast is blocked out, meaning if I have Sat and they are showing the game on TNT, TNT will be blocked for three hours. It costs money to hear it on the net.

The result: more often then not, I find my self chatting with people from other states to find out how my home town teams are doing. Somehow I'm missing the logic of pro-sports marketers here.

It's time for the GPL of Basball

All MLB Baseball games should be Free

Groups of independent fans could build their own stadiums whereever they please, so long as everyone is able to sit there at no charge.

You could have your own MLB games anytime, as long as you made the players available to everyone!

helpful clarifications

A lot of people seem to be jumping to conclusions about how this will work. An interview [rbn.com] with the president of MLB.com clarifies some details that are rather vague in the various press releases. Important points are that there will be ads, and that the video highlight package is separate from the radio broadcast. Also, the local sportscasters will be retained, and local radio station webcasts will be "phased out," meaning that you can still listen for free for a while.

Basically, you're paying 10 bucks to have every game be available in english, spanish, and french with either the home or visiting broadcaster. In many cases, these options were available before. I don't think its worth it, but as a Yankee fan in Ohio I don't have much of a choice and I'll pay it.

The video highlight service they describe is completely different. It sounds as though that is what you need GoldPass (and therefore non-free RealPlayer) for. Also, it won't even launch until May and promises to give you access to every pitch of every game throughout the season. That seems like a pretty powerful tool, although when it comes through RealPooper software who knows what it will be like.

Re:If you look

Actually, you can either order Gold Pass from Real, or you can pay $10 to mlb.com and use the free RealPlayer (which is what we Linux users need to do).

In addition, you get $10 off at mlb.com's online store, which is a cute way to attract shoppers.

All in all, 10 dollars a year for streaming baseball games is a good deal for any but the most casual fan of realaudio games. It's not like they went with Windows Media, so count your blessings.

Sports News Matters?

I thought this was "News For Nerds"

Since when are nerds and geeks into sports?