For clarification’s sake, as we’ve had some confusion about the technology used on our various products this week, I thought I’d post the following. MLB.TV Mosaic users have been facing issues this week which have now been largely resolved. We’re aware that some of you are still seeing intermittent issues, and are working down the list to try to get to you all. The best way to get support on your individual issues is in the Support Forum. In several instances these issues have been erroneously connected to Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in.  MLB.TV offers three different download options for its subscribers to view content, one of which utilizes Silverlight (for a side by side view, please visit: http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/subscriptions/download.jsp). The issues being reported and addressed here are associated with the MLB.TV Mosaic, which does not use Silverlight. Microsoft is currently engaging with MLB.com to ensure the Silverlight platform delivers the functionality MLB users expect for our web based MLB.TV product, as opposed to the MLB.TV Mosaic, which we work on with another partner. 

Hi all, 

Thanks very much for your patience. With this being MLB.TV’s most anticipated Opening Day ever, we appreciate your frustration. Ultimately we ran into conflicts that were buoyed by an entire suite of new products rolling out simultaneously that didn’t affect themselves with less than the full slate of games being played concurrently.

We hope you all enjoy the mosaic throughout the season and will be monitoring the support forums here around the clock while we ensure that everything is stable.

If you are having any trouble, we ask that you post in the support forum, as opposed to commenting here, as it will get a more timely reply from a larger group of our engineers.

Once again, you can go to the forum by clicking here.

You can download the Mosaic for Mac and PC by clicking here.

Thanks from the entire MLB.TV Mosaic team.

-Justin

We’re putting the finishing touches on the new MLB.TV Mosaic for those of you who are premium subscribers (or those considering, you can purchase a subscription by clicking here ), and i’ll again be using the Mosaic blog as a place to provide high level commentary on our new features and addressing general questions/release notes/etc for you all. In addition, this year we are continuing the support forum where our team will be answering technical questions. It’s the best place to check if you’re having trouble getting the app installed or using it, or just want to submit feedback. Once again, we appreciate all of you using the product, and are looking forward to a great baseball season as much as you all are. 

Hi all,
I’m writing to announce to you all that we’ve set up a support forum, available here at http://mlb.ensequence.com, that will allow for better consolidation of our support teams suggestions, results, and insight, and allow you all to post your various issues and resolutions as well. Shane, who leads our support team and some of you I’m sure have spoken to, will be the principal maintainer of the support forum and will be commenting there. The blog has been very helpful in providing tactile feedback as we worked to make sure you’ve all been supported, but I think that the next generation of this will be more efficient via the forum. It’s not currently integrated with our mlb.com user accounts, so you’ll need to sign-in there for the time being, but it should provide a starting point for us to consolidate all of this information. We’re also going to be working on getting a better feedback mechanism in place for next-generation features and functionality. Finally, we’re actively working on enhancing our video encoding as well, to provide even higher quality video via the mosaic and mlb.tv for you all.

Thanks,

Justin Shaffer

Some updates for you all coming before tomorrows games:
We should have fixes in for the following:

– Any remaining isolated player tracker issues.
– Mac Version: Audio switching causing the video playback to stutter/freeze intermittently
– Linescore not showing the 9th inning
– Mac clock intermittently stopping
– More Vista install fixes
– Game status updates around the UI

Issues we’ll be working on tomorrow:

– PC Video showing as black for about 15-20 seconds on startup, before it starts playing. The audio plays from the start.
– Helping those still struggling with installs, audio/video playback, hardware, and video driver issues
– Vista Stability
– Application stability overall
– Additional work on international/edge case credit card verification issues
– A tutorial overview of the features and functionality that may not be overtly obvious. Lots of neat tricks that some of you are finding, but others may not.

In addition, we’re continuiing to optimize the high quality streaming in the 4/6 game view of the Mosaic for tomorrow’s games, which we believe will clear up the majority of the rebuffering issues that some of you have seen. A side effect may be slightly longer initial buffering, with one or two rebuffers early on, but it should stablilize and not rebuffer at all going forward.

We’ll be working through those of you that are still having trouble getting video/audio to play at all tonight and tomorrow morning.

Thank you all again for all of the time you’ve been putting in to help us make sure we’re delivering for those that are having trouble, it’s very much appreciated. I’m going to try to get a few hours of sleep, but will be back in about 4 hours as we’re going to do some network upgrades to better handle traffic load for tomorrow’s day games.

Thanks again,

Justin

Hi all,
In an effort to respond more quickly, we’ll be addressing Install issues in this one thread. For those of you still having install issues, please post a comment in this thread that includes:

Operating system and the error you’re receiving, as verbosely as you’re able.

We’ll be responding in the comments section and getting in touch via email with some of you directly.

Thanks,

Justin

Those of you still having trouble with the player tracker – please force refresh the popup window where you pick the players – control-F5 on windows, and this should clear it up.
Functionally, you should pop up the window and it will prompt you to login (or if you are already logged in in the mosaic, just be sure you’re using the same account in the browser as you are in the mosaic). Once logged in, add your players – make sure you see them on the right hand side, and then at the bottom of the window make sure you click on Save. Then close the window, and click the update button in mosaic and you should see your players.

Thanks,

Justin

Alright guys, we’ve put the mosaic back up, and have a new build available. Some of you have probably seen this and already been playing around.
Regarding the open issues discussed earlier:

-We fixed the CC popup window issue (just to confirm again – this is a secure connection, so no need to worry about putting your card in). If you’re still having trouble with this, please let us know.

-We believe we fixed the player tracker issue, though the player tracker problem was not within the mosaic – it was in the popup window on the site that lets you actually pick players. It taking some time to propagate the changed pages to all of our caches, so if you’re still having trouble with player tracker, it should be resolved by 5pm at the latest.

-We are still working on the high quality streaming, but have put them back in utilizing Swarmcast for tonights games for the time being. If you’re having trouble in the 6 or 4 game view getting video, please try the low quality setting, instead of the medium or high. Regarding feedback, I’d very much like to hear about your experiences on the medium or high streams – we’ve had reports of less than optimal behaviour. There should be no issues with either 400k or 700k single game streams though.

-Regarding open install issues, I’m posting up some instructions from our QA team here that should hopefully help you guys self-diagnose with video related issues. I’m going to put another install thread up, so those of you still having trouble installing can post there. Sorry for the delay getting through these – we want to get you all working and watching baseball on the mosaic while trying to work through the bigger open issues.

Thanks,

Justin

Hi All,

Just a quick note which may not have been clear. We don’t currently support 64 bit (vista or otherwise), only 32. We’ll be working on getting a 64 bit version working, but i dont have a specific timeline on it yet. We know many of you with higher end machines are moving to 64 bit, and appreciate the extra horsepower, and will address it asap.

Thanks,

Justin