Having learned my lesson with mlb.com a couple of years ago – giving them a limited-duration, limited-amount, one-time credit card to avoid automatic renewal charges, I decided to again subscribe to their audio broadcast service. I enjoy listening to baseball radio characters from other cities, although the older announcers seem to be fading away with their unique styles. I did grumble for a year that they switched broadcast station in the Boston area to a station with a weak signal so people will *have* to pay for the online service. Sadly, that’s life. Anyway…
mlb.com is a bleeding edge website and I do not say it at all in a negative fashion. What they did with their Gameday application in Flash, where you can get scores, stats and more in live animation, preceded most major data-driven rich Internet applications. They also rightly moved from Real Audio, which was just bad, to Microsoft’s embedded media player for their live broadcasts.
This year, they chose to move to a new technology again, opting to switch to Microsoft’s Flash-killer, Silverlight, as the mechanism to broadcast online. Problem is, on multiple computers, in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, their Silverlight player fails. While you can still opt to use the Windows Media Player, you are strongly encouraged to switch to Silverlight. Still, there is one big problem: the Silverlight player plainly does not work. Better yet, once you switch, there is no way to go back to the old Windows Media Player, despite instructions in their FAQ that refer to options that do not exist.
Contacting mlb.com’s support by email is a joke. You send in an email, get an immediate response that they will answer you as soon as possible, only to well, never be responded to. I am waiting for a month. The solution, though, is easy. Just uninstall Silverlight. Removing the cookies from the site does nothing to correct the issue, but outright removal of Silverlight does allow you to choose to use Windows Media Player again and you can get your money’s worth. A bit absurd but with mlb.com, well, you need to do preventative and creative actions, rather than rely on them to give you your money’s worth.
They suck. They deserve bad publicity. So there you go.
