A ? For MLB.TV Subscribers

[chrismarullo]

I'm considering subscribing to MLB.TV but I see they have these blackout restrictions.

How do they know where you are and can you tell them you're in another market?

Do they blackout all of your home teams games whether they are at home or not?

[Astro]

While I do not have an MLB.tv subscritption (I'm sure my dialup would love tryin to run that) I can tell you that your IP address will let them know where you live and will control what games are blacked out

The rest I cant help you with, I use Yahoo! Gamechannel ( http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/gamechannel ) and listen to XM Radio to get my baseball, I'd recommend that for anyone on dialup

[Baseball Guru]

Goodluck getting an answer to that questions... The guys on Baseball This Morning couldnt even answer the question... For example, Mark Patrick lives in Indy and some nights he gets Cubs, Whitesox, Cincy, Cleveland and St. Louis games and other nights they may all be blacked out....

I just dont undeerstand the "road" part of it... Say I want to see a Rays game and they are playing Baltimore.. If the game is in Baltimore and I'm not getting any local coverage, why on earth would the game be blacked out here in the Orlando area? I always thought the idea of a game being blacked out was to get fans to the games... But if they are on the road, do they expect me to drive up to Baltimore to see it? I just dont get it?

[Mattingly]

Someone once gave me the "trick" to that thing. If you have a dial-up account (which may kill your refresh rate and speed), if you dial into a modem outside of your "footprint" (such as my dialing to Illinois when I'm in New Jersey), that would give you a different IP Address.

If you're using a cable or DSL account, they'll know exactly where you're dialing from.

[wdw]

Oh man...let me tell you of my experrience with MLB.TV. After much deliberation, I purchased a monthly subscription Friday night as I wanted to watch the A's vs. Felix Hernandez. I clicked on the game, and "connecting to media... ... ..." would show for about five minutes, then I'd get an error message about "Connection could not be established, please try again." I read over the FAQ on their site and confirmed I wasn't missing something. I then sent an email to customer support, and tried calling them- nothing but a dialtone. Everytime I tried, the entire weekend, I got the same error message, and the same dialtone when I called. By MondayI was furious, and wanted to call to cancel and demand a refund (by the way, my three sent emails were never answered). Surprise, surprise, nothing but a dialtone. Same thing Tuesday. Today, I was able to get through- I waited on hold 63 MINUTES and was disconnected. I immediately called back to receive a message "I'm sorry, all of our lines are currently full, please try again later." I tried off and on over the next 3 hours, and kept getting the same message. Finally, I got through, and waited 43 minutes on hold before getting through. I asked for my subscription to be cancelled, and asked for a refund since the service never worked for me and I had been unable to receive any help. I was "out of the grace period" by one day, so a "refund wasn't possible." I calmly explained that this was because I couldn't even get through to them on the phone and my emails had been ignored- it didn't matter.

So, basically their service is absolutely horrible. As far as blackout, they are indeed an issue, I believe there is somewhere on the mlb.tv site that will show you, after entering your zip code, whether or not your local team(s) will be blacked out- most likely, they will.