Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post called me earlier today and now has posted a very good piece on this MLB-DRM debacle for his Faster Forward column at the WaPo.
Pegoraro writes: "On Thursday, MLB.com's Gould said 'I can't imagine something like this happening again.'"
I have to say, when Allan started blogging about this, it didn't surprise me in the slightest. I had various MLB subscriptions for a couple years (until I moved back to lovely New England and lovely NESN), and I found that MLB.com was run with a remarkable combination of incompetence and greed.
My favorite thing was when they would send you an email saying that your subscription was being automatically renewed and giving you _no method_ to terminate it. When I got that email in the spring of '06, I emailed them to say that I wanted to unsubscribe... and got no response. So I called them, waited on hold, spoke to a guy... and they charged my credit card anyway.
Around the same time they got rid of the the RealPlayer feed, which meant that it was not possible to watch games on a Mac in full screen. (Maybe things have changed since then?)
At the time I figured that MLB had just hired someone to run the web site and they didn't know what they were doing. But after the whole Extra Innings controversy, and this... I think Bud Selig just doesn't want us to be able to watch the games.
Very nice!
ReplyDeletePegoraro writes: "On Thursday, MLB.com's Gould said 'I can't imagine something like this happening again.'"
ReplyDeleteI have to say, when Allan started blogging about this, it didn't surprise me in the slightest. I had various MLB subscriptions for a couple years (until I moved back to lovely New England and lovely NESN), and I found that MLB.com was run with a remarkable combination of incompetence and greed.
My favorite thing was when they would send you an email saying that your subscription was being automatically renewed and giving you _no method_ to terminate it. When I got that email in the spring of '06, I emailed them to say that I wanted to unsubscribe... and got no response. So I called them, waited on hold, spoke to a guy... and they charged my credit card anyway.
Around the same time they got rid of the the RealPlayer feed, which meant that it was not possible to watch games on a Mac in full screen. (Maybe things have changed since then?)
At the time I figured that MLB had just hired someone to run the web site and they didn't know what they were doing. But after the whole Extra Innings controversy, and this... I think Bud Selig just doesn't want us to be able to watch the games.