Filed under: Multimedia, Software, Video, Internet Tools
MLB.TV Mosaic: baseball nirvana
Today is one of the best days of the year: the sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, spring is in the air. It's Opening Day! Major League Baseball has really been on the forefront of delivering content on the web, and this year looks to be the best yet. MLB.TV started testing their stand-alone Mosaic player last year, and it looks like they've updated it significantly for the 2007 season (it just became available for download last night). Mosaic is a very cool application that lets MLB.TV premium subscribers watch six (!) baseball games simultaneously (the above screenshot is rather boring since there were only two games last night). You can then click on any of the game to bring up a larger size window focusing on that game alone (as below). This year MLB.TV is doubling the bit-rate of their streams to 700kbps so I would expect the video quality to improve significantly over the last few years.
The biggest downside to Mosaic is that it's a resource hog. This is unsurprising when you discover that it is in part a Java application that depends on Flip4Mac for the video (all the streams are Windows Media based). In addition, location based blackout restrictions apply to the home markets of teams (based on the billing address of your credit card). Nonetheless, for the big baseball fan (and particular fantasy baseball player) Mosaic is close to nirvana, especially for those of us who no longer live in our favorite team's home market.
The Mosaic player is included with a premium subscription to MLB.TV which is $119.95 per year. They have also have a regular subscription for $89.95 that will allow you to watch one game at a time in a browser window as well as an audio-only Gameday Audio subscription for $14.95.
Oh yeah, Go 'Stros!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Hans said 9:52AM on 4-02-2007
Go Stros!
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Galley said 9:56AM on 4-02-2007
Opening Day should be a national holiday. They need to get rid of Columbus Day.
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todd said 10:38AM on 4-02-2007
Sorry, I think there was a typo in your post.
I think you meant to say "Go (Defending American League Champion Detroit) Tigers!"
I'll just assume that's what you meant. No need to issue a retraction / correction. :)
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umijin said 10:52AM on 4-02-2007
GameDay Audio stopped working last year on Macs, around September, because of an incompatibility with Safari and FlipForMac. They made no attempt to repair the issue for the rest of the season, and the only way it would work was via the old Windows Media Player for Mac via Safari, and then only sometimes.
The GameDay Audio Tech support was not very helpful or informative, and I had to threaten to terminate my subscription before they came up with the kludgy Windows Media player solution. This year, when my subscription was supposed to be renewed a month before the season - I asked the custo support people if they would guarantee Mac functionality. I've had no response since that time.
You can see my fun correspondence with them in August here:
http://mackenchi.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html
I haven't tried the Game Day Audio this season yet, but would be wary about that as well as the MLB TV (though it seems to work in the above screen shots).
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matt said 12:55PM on 4-02-2007
go A's!
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Rick said 1:10PM on 4-02-2007
"...allow you to watch one game at a time in a browser window"
There's a setting in the flip4mac pref. pane that's very handy here: "Launch QuickTime Player" The MLB.tv popup will open, and then quicktime player will launch with the game video. (Of course you can then close your browser and watch the video full screen.)
@umijin: I think you meant "stopped working in Safari" (as opposed to "on Macs"). I never had any problems in firefox.
Gotta love opening day. Everyone's undefeated! (Sorry, Cardinal fans.)
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Mat Lu said 1:14PM on 4-02-2007
Last year I always used Camino or Firefox and for the most part I didn't have any problems. Once Mosaic was launched in the middle of last season, I tended to use that without any major problems.
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Rick said 1:33PM on 4-02-2007
D'oh. I just tried to use mosaic with my two monitor setup and it couldn't deal at all in full screen. It was running windowed on the secondary monitor, and when I clicked "full screen" it ran full screen video on the primary monitor and blacked out the secondary monitor.
I guess I'm back to using the old mlb.tv in quicktime player for now.
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rscott said 5:28PM on 4-02-2007
You have to watch 6 games at once to stay awake.
To quote Homer Simpson about baseball:
"I never knew how boring this game was until I gave up beer."
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Galley said 7:43PM on 4-02-2007
I've been camped out in front of the TV all ay watching baseball in glorious High-Def! DirecTV has a special channel where can watch eight games at once, and you can toggle between the audio. Of course, that costs extra. ;-)
Go Nats!
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Marshall Hansen said 1:20AM on 4-06-2007
I have been unable to get Mosaic working on my mac. I am able to log in but in a couple seconds the mosaic player shuts down. If I trying to view the video in a browsers it doesn't work either. Firefox shuts down. Safari shuts down. Netscape doesn't shut down, but it doesn't work. This may be related to some other issue. When I try to watch video on other sites, for example cnn, I get the same results.
Any ideas?
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Murray Rose said 8:08PM on 5-08-2007
I have a MacBook Pro w/ Intel 2.33 Ghz, Mac OS X 10.4.8, with Safari 2.0.4.
Tried to listen to GameDay Audio on my new MacBook Pro. Tried again after downloading WMP for Mac, v. 9.0. Message came up saying Safari doesn't support or have that particular plug in. Says to try in WMP, which I do, which results in the WMP player loading then getting a simple message saying an error occurred. BTW, MLB.com tech support and/or customer service, NOT impressive despite her being nice.
Anyone using a MacBook Pro and consistently getting on to GameDay Audio via another browser like Firefox or other software like Flip4mac which I know little about.
OR Is Macintosh platform and GameDay audio simply not happening?
thanks in advance,
Murray
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