MLB.tv & Blackouts

One of the serious drawbacks of no longer being a cable tv subscriber is that I cannot watch local sports.   For the most part, it is the lack of baseball that gets to me.  It seems like it was only a few years ago that baseball games were broadcast locally.  Those days are definitely gone.  Most of the Red Sox games are now only broadcast on the cable channel NESN.  This means I cannot watch Red Sox games.

Every few weeks, ESPN will carry a Red Sox game and I can watch it online on ESPN3.  Being able to watch these ESPN games online has been a pleasant surprise.  ESPN provides the online viewing experience that I had hoped to get from MLB.tv.

For a cost of about $100 a season, MLB.tv provides online access to live baseball games.  This would work out great if it weren't for the blackouts. 

As a Red Sox fan living in the greater-Boston area, MLB.tv cannot work for me because they blackout all of the Red Sox games.  For that matter, if I was a fan of another American League team and they happened to playing the Red Sox in some far away city, that game would also be blacked out.  I suppose that I could follow a National League team and avoid the blackouts, but unfortunately this is not the viewing experience that I am looking for.

Last year I read a couple of articles that talked about MLB.tv lifting the blackouts, but that did not come to pass.  I still hold out hope that the blackouts are lifted at some point in the near future.  In the event that this does not happen, I would be more than happy to see NESN offer a subscription service that would allow me to to watch the Red Sox games via their website.

To Cable TV or Not to Cable TV

Last week I called Comcast and requested that they downgrade my cable television service from the Digital Classic package to broadcast channels only. This is a rather fun conversation to have with the Comcast folks. Their procedure seems to require that they escalate the call at least twice to give a couple of supervisors a chance to talk the caller out of this decision. Despite their efforts, I prevailed and the service has been downgraded. This downgrade will save us about $50/mo.

Gone are the satellite channels and the on-demand service. What remains are just the channels that I would be able to receive with an antenna, if I had a desire to put one on my house. The trick now will be to adjust my viewing habits to the remaining service.

My first trial was making it through the first round of the baseball playoffs. This year the games were broadcast on TBS only, which is not part of the service package that I currently have access to. I had to rely on the radio and the pitch by pitch updates on my phone to follow the progress of the Red Sox. For the next round of the playoffs, I will likely be seeking out a neighborhood bar.

For my other TV viewing needs, I have been looking towards Hulu.com. Hulu has a large quantity of television series available on-demand. Thus far I have worked my way through the first few episodes of 'Fringe' and have caught up on a couple of episodes of 'Bones' that I missed.

The interesting thing here is that you cannot just flip through channels. After choosing a program, you have to wait a minute for it to start and then enjoy the program. Hulu does have ads, but I cannot say that I mind watching four 30-second spots over the course of a 45 minute show when I would have to endure 15 minutes of ads if I was watching it on TV.

My ultimate goal here is to actually start reading a bit more and maybe visit the town library from time to time, but I have to say that it is nice to be able to look to the internet to help wean me from my tv habit.

Taking a Look at the Cable Bill

Our Comcast cable bill came today. For a change I sat down and read it, instead of just paying it. It turns out that along with their 6Mbps internet access and "Digital Starter" cable tv service, we are paying $10.95/mo for their "Digital Classic" package.

I noticed that in with the bill there was a nice little chart showing the channels that fall into each package. On this I saw that the Digital Classic package consists of about fifty channels in the 200's. As I looked down the list, I realized that we never really watch any of these channels. From time to time I look at them when there is nothing on, but no where near enough to justify $10.95/month, so I decided to call Comcast.

During the call the Comcast rep came close to talking me into changing to their "Triple Play" package (Internet/Cable TV/Phone), but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. It would have involved locking in to their service for either 12 or 24 months and paying a $99 installation fee.

This "installation" would involve having a rep come out to our house upgrade us to a combo internet & phone modem. I am familiar with how this is setup. A couple of weeks ago I help a friend move his Comcast combo modem down to his basement (so he did not have to look at it anymore), but Comcast was not willing to allow me to "install" it myself.

End result here was that I decided to stick with what we have, just without the Digital Classic package. And I did have the added joy of being charged $1.99 for the right to remove the package from our service.

I have to say I am still holding out hope for FiOS, but it looks like it will take a while to arrive. I recently ran into an article that tels me that the town of Hanson, MA is not on the FiOS expansion list for 2008.

Maybe Verizon will change their mind.