Alright all of you, I know its been a frustrating day for many of you (it’s been for me as well, to say the least). That said, it’s also been nice to hear from those that have gotten things working and like the app. I’ve been off the air for a bit here as we work through problems and apologize for the lack of instant feedback. The whole team here takes this extremely personally (we’re all big baseball fans too), and want to provide the best service possible to you all.

Here’s where we are for tomorrow morning, regarding the major bugs discussed on the blog today:

-CC Verification Form popping up repeatedly / Not letting people into the application / Not displaying that it is secure: This will be resolved with a patch overnight, and will be fixed for tomorrows games.

-Playertracker issues: You should all expect that playertracker will be working great after another round of bugfixing overnight, and as soon as you see a new version available tomorrow (I’ll announce it here on the blog – probably around 1pm eastern in advance of the first games at 4pm).

-Streaming Issues/Quality: We’re working through the night on some fixes that should address the majority of the streaming issues that weren’t caused by our services provider today. I’m optimistic we’ll be back where we wanted to be starting before games tomorrow. If you’re struggling here, its worth note that the single game view in the mosaic has been working well all day, and is a pretty neat set of functionality with the stats alongside and additional data.

-Install Issues: After getting people the right installer, we’re making progress on this group. We know that some of you are still struggling with driver issues/software issues/etc., and want to address you all individually. I’ll put up another install thread here for those of you still having problems that our support team will be working through. Please post up your OS version and details about your machine with your post there.

Other notes:

-A few of you have asked about masking email addresses here, which i appreciate from a spam perspective, though I’ve offered mine up via the same posts to you all. I’m not sure about making that change, but can take a look into it once the mosaic is working great for you all – which is our first priority. I’ll ask respectfully that we try and keep the commentary here for all to see in an effort to encourage transparency and open discussion amongst the group about the product, but if you need to email, I’ll do my best to get back to you all quickly.

Thanks again for the support and patronage of the product. We appreciate all of your feedback and comments.

Best Regards,

Justin Shaffer

After a longer development and test period that I would have liked, I think we’re finally ready to give our mac users a sneak peek at the MLB.TV Mosaic on the mac platform. Some of our more astute users may have noticed the Mac download link up on the download page yesterday, but im announcing it here on the blog first, and we’ll be emailing our mac user base shortly to let them know its available. I realize the regular season is just about finished, and we’ll be developing on both the PC and Mac platforms through the off-season to have both products polished and ready for you all for next year. For international users, we hope you’ll enjoy the mosaic throughout the post-season as well. Thanks for all of your feedback and support.
The following are some known issues with the Mac Beta that we’re working on handling better:

– Install prompts user to install Java 1.5, but user can not install Java 1.5 with out installing Java 1.31 & 1.4.2 Release 2. Java 1.5 Release 4 requires OS 10.4.5
– Low end boxes will play video slower than normal, and then skip or catch up when it receives a new I frame.
– System needs the font Helvetica Bold to display text correctly
– System needs to support Millions of colors to display graphics correctly
– After an OS upgrade, the display resolution will need to be reset, as the application may attempt to use 256bit color depth.
– QuickTime video issue that some times the video will loose quality until the next I frame update. This reveals itself mostly on the mosaic
– Log in error text is not always correct. It will sometimes say unable to log in on the first attempt, and then “logged in to many times” on the second attempt.
– The dock bar when set to a large size will cut off the bottom of the application when going full screen.
– Video shifts when going from single game to full screen, and from single game to mosaic.
– Login is limited to two concurrent instances, which means 1 mosaic and 1 browser can both be logged in, or two browsers and no mosaic, or two mosaic’s and no browser. The user must use the “sign out completely” on a web browser to log out of that browser. Closing the browser does not log you out.
– Scroll bars will float outside the intended scroll bar range if an update occurs when the user has the scroll bar active.
– Team select drop down does not highlight when a team is selected.
– Clicking ?ok? repeatedly or hitting enter repeatedly on the login screen will cause the application to say ?The MLB.TV Service is unavailable please try again soon?. This message is false, the user just needs to click once or hit enter once to login.
– Alerts displayed when first launching the application may not match the player?s alerts. The default alerts are displayed for the first 15-30 seconds upon application launch.

Welcome to the MLB.TV Mosaic Product Team Blog. We’re going to be using this blog for announcements, release notes, and general commentary on our process as we continue to beta test the MLB.TV Mosaic with your assistance. We very much appreciate all of the feedback we’ve received so far, and are looking forward to continued dialogue via the blog with you all.   

For those of you who may not be familiar with the MLB.TV Mosaic, it is a downloadable application that enhanced the MLB.TV viewing experience. It will allow you to watch up to six games simultaneously and select the audio from the game you would like to listen to. In addition, we provide live boxscores, and player alerts alongside the game when watching a single game. More detail can be found here.

Check back first thing April 2nd in the morning for the latest updates on our first 2007 Mosaic release, and expect updates from us often here and via the product.

In addition, you can find some useful links for the Mosaic on the left side of the page.

Check back often, or subscribe to our RSS feed with your newsreader for updates from the team as we continue development.

Thanks,

Justin and the entire Mosaic Product Team

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Justin Shaffer
Senior Vice President, New Media
MLB Advanced Media, L.P.