Hi all,
I’ve received correspondence from a number of you regarding blackouts, and wanted to respond en masse to blackout specific issues, as there has been a fair amount of mail and this will get information out to you a bit quicker. We’ve reviewed the accounts of all of you that have written in, and fixed any issues/cleaned up data where we saw that there was an issue with CC verification. Also, in the latest version of the mosaic, we’ve simplified the CC verification form.

For those that are still having trouble getting into games on either the Mosaic or MLB.TV, you’ll need now to call into our customer service department (details here: http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/help/contact_us.jsp) and speak with a representative. We’ve heard your frustration on wait times, and are working to split blackout related call traffic to address it more efficiently. The beginnings of this are already in place. You can select option 1 on the phone, and that should get you more quickly to a representative that will be able to assist you in verifying your account.

For those that feel that they are improperly blacked out, you should call in as well, and just one call should allow them to either explain why you’re blacked out, or help you get access to the games you’d like to see.

Thanks again for your patience and understanding.

Best,

Justin

Hi all,
Here’s a quick status update for you all on what we’ve been working on. Again, we all appreciate the time commitment to getting this going with us.

We’re working on another build for you all that we’ll be releasing tomorrow morning, with many more updates to the app and bugfixes. I’ll post detailed release notes when the build is available.

In addition, we’re making good progress with many of you who have had installation and playback issues. Generally speaking, the issues we’re now down to are in the following areas:

End User Hardware not within System Requirements: Many of you don’t have new enough video drivers, a new enough video card (that supports DirectX 9.0c), or a PC or Mac that are fast enough to handle the player. In this case, your options are to upgrade your video card and/or your machine. The Mosaic is a next-gen high end app, and unfortunately for some, the requirements are a bit higher than for the windows media player on the MLB.com site. However, if you’re struggling with Mosaic, please note that you can still watch the high quality 700k streams on the site.

Connectivity: Some of you clearly have borderline connections to handle our high quality streams. We’re continuing to work on further optimising the swarmcast app that handles this for us in order to make things more efficient.

Video/Audio playback I’ll be posting some additional tips for those of you still struggling with this. The majority of the issues we’ve seen have been due to hardware not within system requirements, and configuration issues on your machines.

Vista Notice If you’re still struggling with getting things going on vista, please make sure you right click and select run as administrator for both the install and when you run the Mosaic program. This should clear up a lot of the issues we’ve seen.

Thank you all again for your support of the product.

Best,

Justin

Here’s a quick suggestion that might help some of you.
Windows Media Player uses a variety of methods to connect to video streams over the internet. Unfortunately, it seems that some of them are causing some problems on some of your machines, which reflects poorly on our product, as it looks to you all like it’s not working.

If you’re having trouble watching single game streams on either MLB.TV or within the Mosaic, I’d suggest trying the following:

1. Open Windows Media Player
2. Open Options, you should see a network settings tab – select this
3. You’ll see RTSP/UDP/TCP/HTTP. Try just leaving TCP and HTTP enabled, if it’s still not working, try just HTTP.

Let us know if this helps any more of you. We’ve seen this clear up issues on a number of our end users machines.

Thanks,

Justin

Happy Easter to you all.
Here are a few tips that have come up that via the threads that have come up and hopefully will help some of you still having trouble.

-if you cant get the player tracker edit window to pop up by clicking “Edit List”, you can go here: http://www.mlb.com/mlb/fantasy/player_tracker/y2007/roster_management.jsp

just make sure you’re logged in with the same user you use to login to mosaic.

-Some users have had some luck tuning TCP parameters on your machine. Here’s a link to a tutorial and application that has helped: http://www.dslreports.com/faq/578

-There isnt a way (yet) to select different audio feeds, but the plumbing is in place in the application, and we do know how neat it would be to listen to alternate audio for a game – so stay tuned.

-For clarification, “virtual” midnight in MLB is 11am eastern time, from the perspective of the site. This means that everything rolls over to the next day at 11am eastern. I got a few emails early this morning asking about why todays games weren’t in the mosaic – this is why.

Hope you all have a great easter if you’re celebrating, or enjoy the weekend otherwise. I’m working today on getting back to those that I or our tech team haven’t gotten to yet who have emailed today, and the team is focused on additional bug fixes and stability increases, as well as updates to the application.

Best,

Justin

Hi all,As we continue to release bugfixes and improve the stability of the product for those of you that are having trouble, we’d also very much like to hear from you all as to what you’d like to see in the product next. Please feel free to post comments here regarding features and functionality you’d like to see in future releases.
Thanks,
Justin

Some of you may be wondering why you’re seeing so many games blacked out today, so i thought i would put up a quick note to explain. Due to FOX’s deal with MLB, they own national rights to saturday day games up through 7pm and then we’re un-blacked out. We know theyre not all available to you via the FOX broadcasts in your various local markets and I understand it’s frustrating (as a MLB.TV fan i share your frustration, i was looking forward to watching the cubs today on Mosaic in the office while i answer your emails).
For future reference, this happens on saturdays until the post-season, and the other national blackout that will affect you on MLB.TV is the ESPN sunday night game (on some occasions they take two Sunday night games) at 8:05 PM.

Also – this is the same with the Extra Innings product – no difference from any other way you would watch baseball out of market. In addition, Gameday Audio (which you have as MLB.TV Premium subscribers) is not blacked out, so you all can listen to the games online, if you’re not able to watch them.

Thanks,

Justin

For anyone still having trouble with player tracker, i understand and appreciate the frustration with putting in a roster, and not having it appear. as of yesterday afternoon, we believe we’ve resolved this. In simple terms, there was an issue on the website when we popped up the window, that caused it to cache some of the data, and essentially potentially edit another person’s roster – hence the missing players.
To guarantee this is resolved, though it should be cleared from all of the caches today, please force refresh the popup window once it opens (control F5 on the pc, click refresh on the mac), and this should then have you editing your own roster.

To double check that this is working for you, before putting in your whole roster, you can try and add one or two players, then save the roster and close the browser window. If you then click update in player tracker in mosaic, and you dont see the players you added, please write in here on this thread, and we’ll get in touch with you directly.

Thanks,

Justin

If you’re having trouble with audio/video playback in the Mosaic (or on MLB.TV on the site for that matter), please use this thread to help us diagnose and solve them. The more detailed you can be in your description of the problem, the easier it will be for us to help you quickly, so anything you can do to describe whats going on is much appreciated. Again, I know you all don’t have to take the time to help, and your feedback is very much appreciated.
Ideally in your feedback, we’d like (though we understand this is a lot to ask for):

OS Version (i.e. Windows XP with Service Pack 2 / Windows Vista, Mac OS 10.4.6, etc )
Computer Model/type/speed/memory (i.e. Dell Inspiron 8600 Laptop with a 2ghz intel processor, and 512Megs of memory)
Video Card that you have (i.e. NVidia with 128Megs of memory)
Internet Connection speed/type (i.e. 3Mbit Cable, or 768K DSL)

Thanks,

Justin

Good news on pong. We’re ditching it for tomorrow’s games, and forever.
A few suggestions to help mitigate some of the issues you all have been having.

-If a stream hangs, an easy way to force the app to immediately try and reconnect is to change the quality level by clicking on another level up on the top right, and then click back to the level you’re trying to watch.

-you can easily customize the 6 game mosaic and 4 game mosaic views: just drag and drop the icons from the top of the screen for each game, onto the window you want it to play in.

-the preferences link in the top right lets you set whether or not you want to see scores for completed games. we put this in to not “give away” the score for games that are over, if you’re coming back to watch the archive.

-The team drop down is a great way to switch games, as is dragging and dropping as mentioned above.

Thanks again for all of the feedback.

Best,

Justin

A number of people have expressed concern that the form in the mosaic is not secure on the blog, which is incorrect. The mosaic form submits data back to our servers using the same secure SSL technology that your browser uses. We’ll be providing additional notification to that on the form going forward.
We’re also working on the bug thats come up today for some of you thats causing the window to continue to reappear.

Thanks,

Justin