Rants, Sports

The Cards, Fox Sports Midwest, UVerse and MLB

4 Comments

So, I know nobody reads this, and this is about the same as screaming in a empty forest, but I’m torqued, and this is my only outlet.

Apparently, Fox Sports Midwest and UVerse are in a pissing contest over money for twenty baseball games. I guess that FSMW has packages of games — one at 132, and another at 152 — and UVerse has elected to go with the 132 package.

So the fans are caught in the middle.

Thinking that MLB could come to my rescue, I went to MLB’s site to sign up for their MLB TV package (delivered through my AppleTV). That service won’t show me games in which the Cardinals are playing, because I’m deemed to be in the Cardinals broadcast area, and they wanna protect the local guys (either over-the-air broadcast, or FSMW).

While it’s technically true that I’m in the Cardinal’s area, it is IMPOSSIBLE for me to see this game, or apparently twenty others… unless I change providers.

It is entirely evident to me that the various enterprises with their fingers in this situation (probably not the Cardinals, although I don’t know that for sure) have completely lost sight of who the consumer of their products are — the fans and viewers.

Now, UVerse has my money, and me under contract, so they don’t care. That’s probably true for many folks in this same situation.

FSMW already has my money vicariously through UVerse, and likely couldn’t care a bit about whether I see the game or not. Their money’s in hand, and there’s no way I can influence them in any way.

MLB is trying to do the right thing, but doesn’t have a way of determining if I’m on UVerse or something else. However, they would like to charge me $120/yr to see every game EXCEPT the ones I most likely wanna see — my home team — through MLB.TV, so they don’t care about this.

Truly, the golden rule applies — he who has the gold, makes the rules. Those of us that are downstream from that just get to enjoy being bashed about by the current whim of those industries and entities who continue to poor-mouth, pointing at each other as the party at fault.

I think it’s back to AM radio broadcasts for me. The Cards have moved back to KMOX, so I can hear them again (sorry KTRS!), and that game delivery is open and free.

For now.

We now return you to the normal tone of this blog.

4 thoughts on “The Cards, Fox Sports Midwest, UVerse and MLB”

  1. I’m with you. I sat down to watch the game last night AND the night before, given that Fox had it on their program list. Nothing. Thanks for clearing this up though I couldn’t figure out what was happening and that it was 2 games in a row worried me that Uverse was all of a sudden giving up on Cardinals games.

  3. I can’t wait to give uverse a first class fit becasue my year is up and I’m not putting up with this crap. They are the most expensive provider and now they are taking cardinals games away..NO WAY. NO WAY. NOWAY. The games are one of the main reason i have cable. I will be switching pronto..

  4. I’m with ya, Liz. One of the big reasons I switched from Charter to UVerse last year was performance issues with Charter, especially on some of their HD feeds.

    Bottom line, I guess, is that none of ’em are perfect, and they’re all gonna fall short of what we — their customers — are looking for.

    Thanks for stopping by!

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