MLB next, please. I don't have cable, which means I just don't watch baseball right now. I would 100% sign up for MLB.tv if I could watch my two favorite teams play.
I don't watch baseball, but I always assumed MLB.tv and NHL.tv used the same technology.
The way NHL.tv used to work, the blackout check would be done when you opened the stream. So you could connect to a VPN in, say, Germany, start the stream, then disconnect the VPN and after a brief interruption the playback would continue. If you did the VPN connection from your router you could stream from any device, too.
Funny thing, the ads always seemed to know exactly what market you were in.
Yep. Fortunately I don't live in the same state as my baseball team anymore. So I watch just about all their games through MLB.tv. Would be so frustrating if I lived near my team though.
For the Blue Jays, the blackout applies to the entire country.
And there are certain geographic badluck regions in the US where one can get blacked out from several teams despite not being close to them. Especially when it's a national broadcast [1]
Also, the marketing at MLB used to be really bad a few years ago -- it seemed to be deliberately targeting home team fans and leaving out the fact that they would not be able to watch their home team.
"Currently, six MLB teams are blacked out all across Iowa: the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago White Sox, Minnesota Twins, Kansas City Royals and Milwaukee Brewers. Those teams are not available to watch with an MLB.tv subscription or when they are often aired on national broadcasts. Some of those clubs are not available on Iowa’s main cable packages either."
"Additionally, some parts of Iowa are more than 500 miles from several of those blacked-out MLB teams."
Things get pretty hilarious when you live in a city with two sports teams and they happen to be playing each other. Every year, Cubs/Sox Crosstown Classic for example.
