tecosystems

Shame On MLB.com

Share via Twitter Share via Facebook Share via Linkedin Share via Reddit

For not supporting Linux as a client platform. Near as I can determine, Major League Baseball – an otherwise astute new media organization – only makes their Gameday audio (and presumably MLB.tv) available to customers with access to Windows Media player. I’m sure there’s a way to get it working w/ VLC & Firefox, but I didn’t have time to figure it out because I was missing an in progress Red Sox / Yankees tilt. For that, I was willing to boot into Windows.

This is why I have difficulty with organizations that standardize on closed standards like Windows Media; it’s not that I have anything against Windows Media Player – it’s a fine platform that I don’t mind using while on Windows. But Microsoft declines to make it available on Linux (I am aware of Wine and CrossOver), which is what I use the majority of the time. Such is their prerogative, of course, but I wish content providers would think about those of us on non-Windows platforms every once in a while. While Linux is obviously a neglible market in terms of share, neglecting it – and other platforms that WMP doesn’t support – seems like a less than ideal approach. I wonder, for example, how the folks from Sun feel about that, given the attention they’re giving Solaris. Real Player, for those of you that are curious, has a Linux version.

While all of this is nowhere near as irritating and MLB’s asinine and generally incomprehensible blackout rules (the primary reason I can’t watch the game on TV), it should be fixed.