Media Living: Boldly Going Where Most Internet Users Have Probably Gone Before

The other day there were THREE baseball games on - one in the afternoon, one in the early evening, and one at night. But because the NFL apparently pays Rogers more money than does the MLB, they weren't broadcasting the first two games on the basic Rogers cable that you can get around here. They were trumped by the football games. This was a royal piss-off for my dad, who LOVES baseball and was really looking forward to watching them. We're not really huge TV people - sports are the #1 reason we even HAVE cable, and are the ONLY reason why we have that one tiny "expanded" package that gives you the 52 channels or whatever.

So TBS is carrying all of the games. And we HAVE TBS. We are technically PAYING for TBS. But whatever feed we get through Rogers wasn't covering it.

This is where the whole "WE ARE THE AUDIENCE, RESISTANCE IS FUTILE" thing comes in, and I get inventive with internet... stuff.

I think I've talked about this before - I'm a relatively timid internet user these days. I visit my few websites. I comment on a few peoples' LiveJournals and Facebook pages and whatnot. But I'm not a forum-goer (well, not until, like, today - more on this later), I don't go out and download a lot of movies or music or anything. I'm kind of conservative these days, I guess. It was really making me mad that dad couldn't watch his games, though, so I decided to see if I could find a live feed online somewhere.

My first thought was that TBS might even PROVIDE a feed on its official website, but they didn't. They had a few shows that could be downloaded, though, so it's nice to see that they're moving in that direction. But this could have been a great opportunity for them: my FIRST THOUGHT (and this would probably hold for lots of other people) was go to the OFFICIAL SOURCE. I would have happily given them my direct viewership, filled out a little form so that they could get demographics on who's watching, whatever. I think there's a lot of opportunity there, and these bigtime media folks had better start cashing in on it.

Anyway, since I couldn't find it that way I did a bit of Googling. Found someone on Yahoo Answers who had voted, kind of suspiciously, that the Yahoo Sports MLB page was the best source. How conveeenient. Of course, this isn't VIDEO streaming, it's just a continually updated play-by-play. Not bad - even a bit better than the service offered on MLB.com. (Speaking of MLB.com, some folks in that same Yahoo Answer thread suggested that they have a video streaming package that you can purchase in order to watch the games, but I don't see anything on the main page - just something about LISTENING to every game. Even if they do, this wouldn't have been very useful for us, since we normally DO get all the games, and definitely will later in the post season. I just wanted to find a way to get that ONE game.)

I was eventually directed to My Peer-to-Peer, where I was able to download a player and look through a variety of streaming sources for the game. Most of them were versions of ESPN in China, and I wasn't able to actually get the game - just a commercial which continually froze and started again. But I found one from the "Brewcrew" that, lo and behold, worked! It was a little slow at first, it had annoying banner ads above and below, and it couldn't be enlarged or made "full-screen" or anthing. But it streamed quite well and had decent video and audio quality. We tuned in JUST in time to catch the most interesting part of the game. The stream even included the commercials, which we basically muted like we always do.

There's also a strong argument here for the old system of broadcasting being pretty significantly out of date. Anything short of the "hundred million channels you don't really want" style of digital cable, this kind of programming conflict is going to happen sometimes. The fact that it was SO EASY for me to get a reliable, live (ish - it was about three minutes behind, by my guess) stream tells me that lots of people must be doing it, too. I am not the most savvy internet user BY FAR, but in about half an hour I had the game at my disposal. We, the empowered audience, obviously ARE doing it.

I have to say, I'm still a little amazed sometimes at how easy it is becoming to get things online. I've downloaded enough movies and music for that experience to be relatively blazé these days. But I wasn't really sure that I'd be able to get live streaming sports - this was an entirely new experience. I was giddy with the enormity of the thing that I had done for the rest of the evening. Yeah, this is probably nothing new for lots of people. What can I say, it was fun to feel all daring and cutting-edge technological for a little while. And I was happy to be able to do something nice for my dad, who generally hates computers and avoids them fervently.

I might make a separate post to talk about this at some point, but for now I'll just note that I'm trying to become a bit more "forum-y" this year during National Novel Writing Month. I used to be more active in the past, but in the past few years I've drifted away from it (again with the "timid internet user" stuff.)

Of course, short of spending hours upon hours online, I'm guessing (and tapping into my years-old past experience, as well) that most people tend to hone in on a few channels. This is likely what I'm going to do.