Feedback Format
The guys over at Strongspace wrote a great little posting on support tickets. For those of you sending in feedback – the commentary below might be helpful! (Here’s the original: http://weblog.strongspace.com/tips-and-tricks/how-to-write-the-perfect-support-ticket )
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Thanks to everyone who has sent in feedback and bug reports. Every single one helps us to improve the service we provide. The most helpful reports are detailed and succinct descriptions of what you’re experiencing.
Here’s a less than helpful report:
Subject: Help!
This thing doesn’t work! I don’t see anything!
Here’s a report that makes it a little easier for us to track down the issue:
Subject: Inconsistent MLB.TV Mosaic Blackout
Hello. I’m having trouble viewing the Yankees game in the Mosaic. When I log in to the Mosaic as “user@website.mlb.com” I see a blackout window shade over the Yankees game. However, if I log into the website with the same user, I can watch the game.
If it helps, I have a 2 Ghz Pentium with 512 MB RAM and I’ve installed Direct X 9.0c and .NET framework 1.1.
I can watch any other games so I suspect the application is fine, but I’d really like to see my team in all of its Mosaic goodness.
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MLB.TV Mosaic Blog 
Since the comments section on ability to self select games within Mosaic is not available I will make my comments here. I constantly find that late games are mixed with early games. Or even worse a blank board will be present on board 2 with games being played on board 3. I can’t believe it is that allowing the consumer to use a drag and drop method would be so difficult to write within the program.
The issue with drag and drop lies within how we’re currently doing the streaming. As we dont “send” the six games individually, its one signal behind the windows and we layer on all of the game specific data. If we were to send the games individually, we’d be alienating more of our users due to bandwidth issues. With that said, we’re pursuing a few different technology paths that we hope will provide for some additional flexibility in this area, in addition to building out more infrastructure within our datacenter that will allow us to arrange the games more dynamically. In the meantime, we appreciate your patience and feedback.
When I am watching a game in full-screen mode, I get a message every few minutes that says “MLB-TV Mosaic has been idle for some time. DO YOU WANT TO CONTINUE WATCHING THE GAME?”. It blanks the screen until I click OK, which is the only response. Is This necessary?
Coyote,
Because the mosaic will run forever if unattended, in order to try to give our consumer base the best possible experience while we’re in beta (and are still sorting out exactly what the best way to address this is), we added that screen to make sure you’re still there and watching. We’ll probably continue it in some form, but agree it does need to be less obtrusive.
Tonight’s screens were pathetic. 3 games on panel 1, 3 games on panel 2 and 2 games on panel 3. The panels could and should been better arranged. The third panel had an east coast game and a west coast game? The six east coast and central games could have been on one screen and the mountain time and pacific time game on a different panel. The sales pitch for Mosaic was that you could watch 6 games on one panel. Doesn’t seen you guys have that as a target goal.
Just a few things. I know it’s been mentioned but it would be great if there was a drop-down below each window to select each game you want to watch.
Also, why not make the game windows larger and cut back on all the flashy logos and buttons everywhere?
Lastly, I enjoy how when accessing MLB.tv and I click “full screen” the game expands to fill my whole tv and all menus disappear. When I am watchin Mosaic, select a game and click full-screen, the game picture doesn’t fill the screen because you get the score and date along the top with the alert bar and volume controls along the bottom.
When I use Mosaic, I get the audio on the highlighted game, but the screen/video is covered by a solid gray block as if the game has been “blacked out”. Also, the mouseover points on the screen are about an inch off. As near as I can figure, I have to put the mouse about an inch below any of the click points if I actually want to activate any function on the Mosaic screen. The Mosaic concept is a wonderful one, but I have to say it’s been nothing short of total frustration so far on the operating side.
The Mosaic app won’t run on my PC at all, (Athlon 3100, 1.8GHz,512Mb,GForce MX4000, Windows XP SP2, DirectX 9.0c, .NET 1.1), failing with this message:
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MLBAppStart.exe – Common Language Runtime Debugging Services
Application has generated an error that could not be handled.
Process id=0x840 (2112),
Thread id=0xb20 (2848).
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This is for the Mosaic app marked with version number 3.70.0.153, downloaded yesterday. I get identical behavior on an almost-identical machine running Windows MCE with SP2, but then again that’s pretty much the same OS anyway.
This Mosaic thing is all a good idea, but it would be nice if y’all would fix the problems in the existing one-at-a-time MLB.tv player before opening up more problems. And still no Mac version, sigh.
And couldn’t you do all this in a simple DHTML/Ajax web page app?
In any of the 6 view panels I continually receive a Connecting message and the MLB TV loading message in each window. When I zoom in on a particular game the Connecting message occasionally changes to a “streaming error, retrying” message. The alerts seem to be functioning as well as the boxscore and linescore info when zommed into a single game.
I am running Windows XP SP2 on a P4 2.6GHz box with 1GB RAM using a 3.0Mbps DSL connection. I have loaded DirectX 9.0c and .NET Framework 1.1. I am hardwired to a NetGear Wireless router and am running Norton Internet Security 2006.
The behavior is identical regardless of if I disable NIS 2006 or not.
Justin —
I don’t see an appropriate place to put this so I’ll put it here. And, I hate to beat this down but I think it is important that BAM be aware of what we as consumers are experiencing which is reducing the quality of any product.
The video switching has been horrid this year. In fact, as the year goes on, it is getting worse and worse.
Take the last 2 games the Pirates played in NY for instance —
— 7/6 bottom of the 6th and no video or audio until the last pitch of the inning.
— 7/5 bottom of the 5th and no video until the 6th pitch to end the inning.
These are just two examples of 20+ poor switching routines during just 84 Pirates games this year. And, it isn’t like BAM isn’t aware.. reports have been called in all year but it just keeps getting worse and worse.
It isn’t just me seeing this.. do a Google search.. folks are mildly upset that they aren’t getting their money’s worth from the original product. I debate that issue of course, but I do believe all the negativity is undermining some potential sales.
Lastly, another habit this year that I hadn’t seen in previous years is missing data in gameday. All too often entire half innings will be missing from pitch-by-pitch play, or incorrect data is listed in pitch-by-pitch play (which I found pretty strange).
As you move toward a superior product, I think it is important that you continue your excellence in the initial offerings and that hasn’t happened this year. Hopefully, some quality control from internal management will solve these simple issues. But, so far, that hasn’t happened.
Pirate
I went to sign in for Mosaic and it asks for all of Credit Card info again. MLB.com has all my info , why is it asking for this again. I am not comfortable having to give out my info again since I already have an account and I get charged everymonth for the service.
Why can’t you just check you records for my info?