Owners of the Roku Netflix set-top box have had an MLB.tv icon on their home screen since August 2009. The logo on the screen originally included a message saying the service would launch with the beginning of baseball's spring training season. MLB.tv subscribers would pay either $99.95 or $119.95 per year to have access to full streaming versions of available pre-season, and then every in-season Major League Baseball game as they happened, with local blackout exceptions. For big baseball fans, it is an excellent package.
But when spring training started, the service was still being beta tested and non-testers couldn't access it. Then the service's opening message changed to say it would be ready to launch on opening day. But when opening day rolled around, the MLB.tv message on the Roku home screen changed again to "Tune in in Mid-April."
On April 22, Sony and Major League Baseball launched an impressive version of the streaming MLB.tv service designed exclusively for the PlayStation 3. Users would be able to watch games on either their home or away feeds in 720p, with a full calendar scheduling system to help them catch all the games they want to watch. At that point, Roku's MLB.tv interface still wasn't ready.
Just under a week later, the service went live on Roku, and an announcement was sent out to subscribers full of caveats warning of potential quirks in the service.
Now that MLB.TV has been live for a week, Betanews has had a chance to use it, and here's our judgment: If you are a Roku owner and not MLB.tv subscriber already, don't subscribe just for the Roku app. If you're an MLB.tv subscriber looking to bring the experience to your TV, consider the PlayStation 3 application first.
The channel's interface is identical to all the other services on Roku, it's clean and simple to understand, but mostly lacks animation.
When you select a game, you can opt to watch the home team's TV feed, or the away team's, denoted by station call signs in the picture above.
When live games go to commercial, the MLB.tv app reverts to the "commercial break" screen. A user of the service recently reported to us that the Flash-based MLB.tv PC application has been randomly injecting targeted advertisements into streams there.
The DVR Function lets you choose the innings that have already happened, and you can skip through the commercial breaks.
Local games are blacked out until 90 minutes after broadcast, then they can be watched in DVR mode. National games, furthermore, such as Fox's Game of the Week, are also blacked out. These games are expected to include the Playoffs and World Series.
Only the score and the current pitcher and hitter can be seen if you click on a blacked out game. There is no box score, and you cannot tune into the audio-only feed like you can on the desktop application.
When you select a game that has already begun, but has not yet finished, you can choose to start from the beginning, go to the current live position, or view by inning.
If you click on "go to live" after a game has already begun, you're given some flexibility in playback.
In the end, Roku's MLB.tv interface is not a complete service. Instead, it acts as a complement to the MLB.tv Web interface, which offers many more viewing options, such as multiple simultaneous streams, picture-in-picture, and radio play-by-play feeds.
In addition to Major League Baseball, Roku partnered with the National Basketball Association for the NBA Game Time channel, which is dedicated to providing Roku customers with highlights, updates, and summaries of the NBA Playoff games. Roku has not announced whether this will become a service offering full live games like MLB.tv.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010