Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Frustration with MLB.TV support

Last night I was all set to watch the Minnesota Twins' second game of the season on my computer using MLB.TV when all of a sudden I got a notice saying that the game was being blacked out due to my location. I had this same issue last year as apparently my home IP address makes MLB.TV think I'm located in the Twins' blackout area even though my zipcode shows that the Twins shouldn't be blacked out in my area. A simple call was all it took last year to correct the issue as the support guy just took my IP address and must have told there systems to allow it. Apparently that fix didn't carry over to this season though so I called up support and waited for ... a whole hour. Finally a friendly person came on the line and told me that he wasn't a technical support person but due to the extreme high volume of calls they were receiving, he was taking names and numbers so that they could call me back and I wouldn't have to wait on the line. I was ok with this until just before hanging up he told me that I would be contacted in the next 48 hours. I paused a bit shocked as I assumed I would be called back that evening yet and asked if there was any way I could receive some kind of reimbursement for the games I was missing. The support guy said he understood that I had payed for a product and it should work but that there were refunds. I wasn't really expecting much if anything so I let it go. It's just the principal of the whole thing seems wrong to me and that bothered me. There isn't much I can do though as my cable provider doesn't carry the Twins and there is no other way to watch the games so I'll just have to wait for things to get straitened out.

The good news is that I didn't miss much of a game as the Twins got slaughtered by a score of 9 to 1. Yuck. Hopefully they've got that out of there system. At least they're still playing 500 ball. Guess they need me watching them more then I realized.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, I noticed Silverlight does not give a true full screen for MLB.TV like last year. Do you know how I can get around that?

armadillo44 said...

I'm quickly finding that I'm not a fan of the Silverlight player and so I disabled the plug-in yesterday afternoon and now it's letting me use Windows Media again which gives me much smoother video and the ability to control the size by right clicking on it. The problem I'm finding is that the video, even if it's 3x4 in appearance, is actually widescreen with black bars on the sides so the picture won't fill the entire screen. For that matter I think the Silverlight format will go fullscreen as well by clicking on an icon that appears when you hover over the video but it has the same issue with the black bars plus is much more choppy. Hopefully they are working on fixing all these problems. Too bad they didn't take care of them in Spring Training.