Valleywag: Major League Baseball

Mark Cuban still in the running to buy the Cubs with Yahoo's money

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:40:00 PDT

Mark Cuban, the boisterous fellow who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1998 and later bought the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, now wants to own the Chicago Cubs. He's submitted a bid which the the Chicago Tribune reports has made it through a first round of eliminations. Don't get your hopes up, Mark: Former Deadspin editor Will Leitch wrote here in January that he'll never get the Cubs, or any other baseball team, because he's far too nuevo rico for the stuffy Major League Baseball owners' club.

In our world of social networking and high-definition television, Mark Cuban is the 1,000-pound gorilla in every room. But in the boardrooms of professional sports, he's just this punk Internet new money kid who doesn't understand how proper decorum and deals get made. And Mark Cuban is almost 50 years old! He's old enough to be Mark Zuckerberg's dad!

Justin.tv plans to make you pay

Jackson West — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:00:00 PDT

Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel detailed how the personal video-broadcasting startup plans to break the profit barrier. His scheme? Setting up a transaction system so that users can pay to view content. He pointed to live sports as an example of something people have been willing to pay for in the past. Justin.tv does make it easy for anyone with a webcam (or video cable) to pirate broadcasts of sporting events.

However, signing distribution deals with American big leagues is rather more complicated — and expensive. The leagues have preferred to own their own Web outlets. Major League Baseball has nearly a decade of experience doing just that. Justin.tv's enablement of real-time piracy will not win it many clubhouse friends. And ultimately, why would anyone pay to watch crappy Flash video when they can get HD over satellite and cable? (Photo by miss karen)

MLB.tv makes like the heart of the Giants order, strikes out on opening day

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:20:00 PDT

Subscribers to MLB.tv, Major League Baseball's paid game-broadcasting website, pay either $19.95 per month or $119.95 per year to watch live baseball on their computers. Theoretically, that is. So far this season all some fans have seen is a lot of swing-and-a-miss from MLB.tv and its technology provider, Microsoft. Switching to Microsoft's Silverlight, a supposed alternative to the Flash technology that runs YouTube and most other video sites, caused opening-day glitches for which the league's technocrats apologized Customers tell us it hasn't gotten much better since. Giants fans may be used to that kind of failure — watching Randy Winn, Bengie Molina and Ray Durham hit 3, 4, 5 will do that — but others are peeved.

"It is a bit ridiculous to pay 20 dollars a month to beta test a product," one fan commented.

It's interesting that CBS is able to handle weekend traffic for the NCAA tournament, display a beautiful picture for a high-motion sport, and then give it away for free.

(Photo by AP/Jeff Chiu)

Justin.tv -- one year old and still full of illegal content

Jordan Golson — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:40:22 PDT

Lifecasting site Justin.tv has come a long way since banning a broadcaster for one night of indecent exposure — that is, sexual acts. There may be less porn now, but other illegal content now graces Justin.tv's servers. Right now I'm watching a stream of Fox Sports Net West's broadcast of the San Diego Padres playing the Los Angeles Angels. Last night, more than 2,000 people watched the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers play. Given Major League Baseball's draconian online reporting rules — no more than seven photos from any game; audio and video clips can be a maximum of two minutes and can't be streamed live — we doubt the MLB is happy about this.

You can read others' "exclusive" posts with lots of fantastic-sounding statistics about how well Justin.tv is doing. Short version: the site has 57 years worth of video that no one will ever watch in its archives. Too bad those bloggers didn't bother to count the hours of improperly streamed videos. We suspect investors and potential advertisers, not to mention MLB and NBA attorneys, would be a lot more interested in that figure.

Major League Baseball pisses off entire nation

Jordan Golson — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:13:31 PDT

Did I anger the instant-messaging gods? First, Facebook sends IMs asking me to join up when I'm already a member. Today I received three separate IMs from Major League Baseball. All three said the exact same thing. While not yet the scourge that junk faxes, spam, and ads on text messages are, IM spam, also known as "spim," is increasingly a problem. I get two to three spim messages a day, most of them on MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. Most of them tout porn and pump-and-dump stock scams. Have you received any interesting spim? Send it our way. MLB's contribution to the genre comes after the jump.

(Photo courtesy jdsbman)