Joel's Blog Archive

Online baseball: not quite ready for prime time

by Joel Aufrecht 12:12 PM, 17 May 2009

I used MLB.tv to watch much of the 2007 baseball playoffs in Singapore. It was around US$20 for a month, and it made it possible to watch many of the games in fairly poor quality: lowish resolution and jumpy. One positive was that, as an international subscriber, I didn't have to deal with any blackout nonsense. One very annoying thing was that they didn't take online unsubscriptions; I had to make an international call to end my subscription after the World Series.

Gus and I don't have a TV in the beach house. We watched last fall's playoff games at the brew pub up the beach. This spring, I thought I would give MLB.TV another try. It was US$20 for a month, including $5 to get Premium service (high-def and rewind and a few extra stats). The verdict is ... mixed.

benefit	devalued by ...
live video of baseball games	At least once per inning, and often more, the picture freezes for a few seconds or more. Even though baseball features perhaps 15 minutes of action in 3 hours, the stutters always seem to happen in the middle of a play. Sometimes the picture doesn't come back until you restart the application. Once, the picture never came back after the commercial break after the eighth inning (of a tie game, of course), and I could only listen to the rest. MLB.tv repurposes the tv and radio productions at all the parks. To limit competition, the broadcasters require blackout areas and periods. Living 30 miles from San Francisco, all games involving the SF Giants and Oakland A's are audio-only. All Saturday afternoon and Sunday night games are also blacked out nationally. If you want to watch any of these, you have to wait until 45 minutes after the game is over (and good luck finding out when the game is over without also finding out the outcome) to watch the archive version, which is blackout-free. The video, the audio, the Gameday, the Yahoo Sports play-by-play, and the real world are all out of sync with each other, so any time you switch media you get a jarring temporal dislocation. (Note that delays from half a second to seven or eight seconds are intrinsic to digital television itself due to how it is encoded for broadcast. Welcome to the Digital Wonderland.
Gameday: computer graphics showing the exact trajectory of every pitch	Every time you start it, you have to sit through a several-minute tutorial on how to use it Every time you want to look at a particular pitch, and you navigate back to the right batter, you have to wait for all of the pitches in the at-bat to get re-simulated, one at a time. Once you have the pitch you want on screen, you have to mess with finicky controls to get exactly the view that you want, and just as you get it the way you want it, and you are ready to actually look at the pitch, the screen resets to show the newest batter.
high definition video	The color balance and other technical things that I don't especially understand mean that a lot of games feature crisp images of garishly colored grass and whitewashed uniforms. High-definition and DVR are unavailable on Linux, because they require a proprietary plugin. This is on top of the Flash proprietary plugin that all of these features already require.
Highlights of all games	Often little highlight blurbs pop up on the side of the game you are watching, distracting you and possibly ruining the surprise if you were planning to watch that game later.
Chose from home and away broadcasters	This actually works fine. It's fun when the Yankees are losing to switch back and forth between the announcers.
DVR features: pause, rewind, etc	Every time you click to use any of these features, the whole thing freezes for ten seconds or more. Try finding a particular moment in the game in less than two minutes.

Categories: Baseball Comments (0)

Well, we know who _isn't_ a trekkie re: [www.newsweek.com]

by Joel Aufrecht 05:49 PM, 08 May 2009

President Obama has asked for a private screening of the new Star Trek movie, Politico reports. They also quote a Newsweek anecdote from the campaign:

"That's an interesting belt buckle," he said to Michelle, mischievously. She feigned offense and said, "I am interesting, next to you. Surprise, surprise, a blue suit, a white shirt and a tie." Obama grinned and bent down until he was almost at eye level with her waist. He jabbed a playful finger toward her belt buckle, and let loose his inner nerd. "The lithium crystals! Beam me up, Scotty!" Obama squeaked, laughing at his own lame joke as Michelle rolled her eyes.

Just throwing out a wild guess, here, but perhaps if we checked the recording, we might find that he said "Dilithium crystals!" rather than "The lithium crystals!". After all, as Obama would surely know, lithium at room temperature is a soft alkali metal with a silver-white colour, not a crystal. Apparently neither the reporter on the scene, nor the Newsweek writer Evan Thomas, nor any of the editors or copy-editors or fact-checkers at Newsweek is a trekkie. Yet another reason not to lament the demise of their profession in its current form.

"Real" dilithium crystals:

Categories: Good News Comments (0)

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