Waiting for a flight home to Boston, I lit up my wireless connection and tuned into MLB.com’s post season baseball feed. Having paid for two years in a row for a fairly weak service full of irrational blackouts and lots of calls to MLB.com’s customer service line to get permission to watch the paid stream, I expected to be able to follow TBS’ post season coverage through the MLB.com subscription.
Well, the good news is that I can — through a pretty slick video viewer that permits to select between eight camera angles and stack them together in a single, PIP, split, or two by two configuration. The problem of this “pick your angle” model is there is no editor/producer selecting camera angles and the overall experience is somewhat shitty. I want someone to decide what I need to see and not click like a fiend to get the camera to track a frozen-rope liner out to the 6-4-3 doubleplay.
The Twitter integration … well is interesting in that the peanut gallery is now officially blessed as contributors to the spectacle.
But overall, the most interesting thing about the MLB/TBS “HotCorner” application is checking out the behavior of the camera operators during commercial breaks when they zoom way in and like creeps perv the faces of the VIPs in the expensive seats to see if there are any celebrities worth calling out during the play-by-play. Being the LA Dodgers one would expect some movie star to be fanning themselves with a program. The funny part is it is obvious the way the camera lingers that some producer is scanning faces and telling the cameraman to stick to faces wearing big “Jackie Onassis” sunglasses or who look important by dint of their jawlines and silver hair.
Go Sox.
oh, yeah, Yankee Suck
Okay, I thought it was just me having this viewing problem, as I couldn’t find anyone else complaining about the lack of a camera editor. I thought maybe my computer system’s specs weren’t up to the required standard. I paid the $9.95 postseason subscription thinking the streamed games would like what you see on ESPN or any other TV station’s game broadcast. I was trying to watch the Giants/Braves game but got frustrated by the limited viewing setup. From the center field cam, I got a good view of the plate but only a little bit of the pitcher, but if a ball was hit, the center field camera just zooms in on the batter running around the bases. Am I really supposed to figure out where the ball was hit and then try to quickly find the camera angle that tracks it? That’s absolutely silly!