MLB in social media stumble with MLB.TV blog

Major League Baseball purged all postings from an official blog in which it had candidly detailed its progress and troubles with a new media player for its MLB.TV game online video streaming service, a move that won't sit well with subscribers, industry insiders say.

Gone are months' worth of postings, along with hundreds of comments from MLB.TV subscribers, including updates on technical issues that were outstanding as recently as Monday -- and quite likely still are. In the blog, the league had said some of those problems would take weeks to fix, and acknowledged it was still investigating the causes of others.

The league also had technical difficulties at the start of last year's season, including slow response times at the MLB.com site and problems with the media player, which had gotten upgraded with Microsoft's Silverlight technology. After the season ended, MLB decided to drop Silverlight in favor of Flash.

But MLB continues to have problems. "We have a lot more to do still to get the [media] player to perform in a more stable manner across the board," read a now-deleted entry titled "Opening Day" and posted Monday at close to noon U.S. Eastern Time.

Now the blog features only a terse, single message, in which MLB justifies as "predictable" the technical problems encountered and directs subscribers to the support forum for questions and information, implicitly stating that the blog is finished as a communication tool between the league and MLB.TV subscribers, although comments to that single posting are still allowed.

The message is also incorrectly dated as having been posted on Monday, when in fact it went up at some point on Tuesday afternoon or evening. A cached snapshot of the blog's home page before it got scrubbed is at press time still available on Google.

The tone of subscriber comments in the blog had taken a turn from collegial and supportive to exasperated and angry as the start of the season approached and issues remained with the new Flash-based media player and other parts of the service. Customer frustration was particularly evident in comments made to postings on Sunday and Monday, days when the season officially began.

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