An Angry Open Letter to the Fine Folks Who Run Match Day Live
Dear Friends at Match Day Live (Text Version Below),
Dear Friends at Match Day Live,
Hello? How are you? Enjoying my $40 dollars? I sure as hell hope you are because I’m not!
For the last couple years as a poor college student, and now as a semi poor married man I’ve happily paid the ever expanding cost of your live service to watch my favorite team, the Kansas City Wizards play. I loved being able to know I could watch them reliably online even if the quality wasn’t great. I paid because even though, for free, I could go to my2p2.eu or justin.tv and usually find the game, coverage was spotty and looked even more pixilated than your rather pixilated service.
So this year, when you charged me $40 dollars I shelled out because 1) I have a shitty TV and 2) It’s not in the budget to get regular cable (or extended, or FSC, or DirectTV).
Excited for the 2nd or 3rd game of the season (I attended the 1st two), I turned on Match Day Live, but low and behold, all I could get was a black screen that said “Watch this game on ESPN, FSC, or an affiliate. I knew the game wasn’t on those channels, so where the hell was it?
All the away supporters in the chat channels were talking about the game, I just couldn’t see it! Frustrated I gave up after repeated attempts.
I repeated this pattern for several different Kansas City Wizards games, trying to watch my team only to find the feeds blocked from me.
The reasons? MDL, as I learned from other angry Big Soccer patrons, blocks your access to the game if is being shown on any local channel.
What utter bullshit! The reason so many people follow MLS is because they can do it all through the internet! We read about it online, we follow live games, we watch crappy feeds, and all of this allows me, and other poor people, to follow a sport and not have to pay 100s for cable. I didn’t pay $40 to watch the random teams play, I paid $40 to watch the Wizards and to block me out, not inform me why, all while taunting me with people happily chatting while they watch, is a slap in the face!
With Love,
Graham Fox
posted by Graham at 10:00
3 Comments:
I am in 100% agreement. There was nothing about the black-out policy posted when they started selling the package. In previous seasons, this was not an issue. They should have specified this from the start.
I spend my money on following my team, not on cable TV, so I'm out of luck when I want to watch an away game via this $40 service.
The blackouts are very annoying and it's true that MLS didn't do that good of a job explaining exactly which games would be blacked-out and why (thankfully I don't live in the local market of my team, I guess), but you have to admit the quality of the streams were a vast improvement this year.
As for the blackouts, there are other ways to stream MLS games on the internet, though they usually don't have the quality of the real thing.
I have Galaxy and Chivas USA games blocked out and I live in San Diego. I only get FSWest on my cable, but Chivas plays mostly on Prime Ticket and some Galaxy games are on there as well.
Even more irritating is the crappyness of the stream. I watched only about 10 minutes of MDL on the last weekend of the season due to streaming problems and several of the games I watched would unexpectedly reset to the beginning of the half.
I'm going to strongly consider going the pirate feed route myself next year.
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