One of the serious drawbacks of no longer being a cable tv subscriber is that I cannot watch local sports. For the most part, it is the lack of baseball that gets to me. It seems like it was only a few years ago that baseball games were broadcast locally. Those days are definitely gone. Most of the Red Sox games are now only broadcast on the cable channel NESN. This means I cannot watch Red Sox games.
Every few weeks, ESPN will carry a Red Sox game and I can watch it online on ESPN3. Being able to watch these ESPN games online has been a pleasant surprise. ESPN provides the online viewing experience that I had hoped to get from MLB.tv.
For a cost of about $100 a season, MLB.tv provides online access to live baseball games. This would work out great if it weren’t for the blackouts.
As a Red Sox fan living in the greater-Boston area, MLB.tv cannot work for me because they blackout all of the Red Sox games. For that matter, if I was a fan of another American League team and they happened to playing the Red Sox in some far away city, that game would also be blacked out. I suppose that I could follow a National League team and avoid the blackouts, but unfortunately this is not the viewing experience that I am looking for.
Last year I read a couple of articles that talked about MLB.tv lifting the blackouts, but that did not come to pass. I still hold out hope that the blackouts are lifted at some point in the near future. In the event that this does not happen, I would be more than happy to see NESN offer a subscription service that would allow me to to watch the Red Sox games via their website.
