Tiger Geist

I did a writeup on MLB’s fantastic ‘at bat 2009′ app for the iphone back on opening day.  As of today, they have expanded the offering to include streaming video (with an upgrade to iphone 3.0 software and mlb at-bat 1.2 ).  This video is currently limited to only a few games / day, but they claim they will be expanding the offering in the coming days / weeks / months.  I was able to watch the Detroit / St Louis game  (the second offering on the new software), so here are my updated thoughts on the application.

First… its limited.  Again, they plan on offering up more games, but there is no guarantee that you will have any use for the video portion of the application for a while.  I still state that the original application, at less then $10, is well worth it.  So the video feed is just ‘gravy’.   I tested this app in both wi-fi and 3G networks.

Overall, the app works as advertised.  Included with the app is a “30 second rewind” which seemed to work well;  a “pause” which worked, and a ‘fast forward’ button that really just took you to the live feed.  Unlike mlb.tv or the original at-bat 2009, you have no selection over the audio or video feed;  it seems like you’re stuck with the home team’s feed/video.  I can live with that, but a nice feature of the original app was being able to choose between the radio station feeds.  Since this was day one, maybe it will change in future offerings.  As a slight reservation, the app must be ‘live’ at all times, or you must restart it entirely (this is different then the behavior if you’re listening to music or a podcast on your iphone while use other applications).  One negative is the start time for starting the app to watching the game can take close to 30 seconds.  Not the end of the world, but not immediate gratification.

Calling:  If you receive a phone call, you are offered to take the call or decline the call, just like any other phone call.  If you take the call, the app is stopped and you must restart later (see app start up times above).  If you decline the call, the app keeps running.  Text messages are very similar — if you get a text, you can read the text and close the text without any issue;  if you choose to reply to the text message, the app will stop.  So, unlike listening to music or a podcast, the application must always be living or you must pay the 20+ second penalty of getting your video feed again.

Unlike the mlb.tv application (which costs a lot of money obviously), you can’t get live stats.  You can break out of the video to get stats, game summary, etc, and going back into video doesn’t seem to take as much time as switching the app out for a live phone call.  An additional bonus is the game feed seems to be further ahead then the mlb.tv feed;  the at-bat 2009 feed is maybe 20 seconds behind the game, while the mlb.tv application (via your browser) is more like a minute.  This is an improvement, but the radio feed that the app is known for seems to be almost live.

For Wi-Fi, the app is fantastic.  Initially, it takes between 10 and 20 seconds to get to your game (there is a quick geo-location to make sure you aren’t blacked out, similar to mlb.tv but with less passwords).  The initial quality is spotty, but but every 20 seconds or so the quality seems to re-adjust itself.  After about a minute, you’ve got a pretty good game to watch.  Once in a while the video will have issues or reset, but I couldn’t complain.  I would say that I was very impressed by the quality.

With 3G, the quality is decent but not great.  I kept waiting for the quality to improve over time (like it will on wifi) but it didn’t seem to happen.  Granted, this is day one, but if it doesn’t change, watching in 3G is kind of pointless.  its not bad if you have no other choice, but you’re really watching a pixelated mess.  But it works.

I can’t speak to the battery life on wifi;  its probably good but not great.  For 3G, it absolutely destroys your battery and leaves it for dead — stay near a power supply.  Its probably the same as streaming 30 minutes of video from youtube on your phone over 3G.  I’d say you are over-estimating battery, phone, and video compression technology to think this would work without decimating your battery life.  Based on the quality of 3G, you’d be hard pressed to watch it for very long either.  I could see it more as a “i’m out and about and have some free time” vs “i’m spending the next 3 hours watching baseball”; at least over 3G.  I was pretty impressed with wifi.

Overall… yes, this thing rocks.  I paid $10 in April for it (and something like $100 for mlb.tv to watch games on a computer) and this is about the most impressive application for the iphone there is.  I know mlb has been highly successful and profitable with it;  i think thats great, the app works as expected.  For video, i’m slightly concerned.  Not because it won’t live up to the hype, but that the previous app was absolutely perfect.  Up to the minute feeds; live audio (pick your radio station), etc, it was all there.  An absolute steal at $10.  Now, the video is free.  Why?  Because they’re using us as beta testers.  Through the rest of the summer, they’ll add some more games, maybe even making it available in some form for all games.  And I’m fine with that.  My concern is for the MLB at-bat 2010 — what will they charge?  If it costs $100 for mlb.tv, and I already find the iphone app more useful for my situation (and that doesn’t factor the cost being a fraction of mlb.tv), what will they charge next year?  $20?  $45?  Maybe some package deal between the tiers?

So there you have it;  if you haven’t purchased mlb at-bat 2009 for the iphone yet, run don’t walk your fingers to the iphone store.  Its amazing that it worked on day one.  I’ll be interested to see how the video offering expands throughout 2009, and how the pricing model expands throughout 2010.  Though, who am i kidding, i’ll probably pay it anyway.