Digital Home Thoughts: Slingbox Striking Out with Major League Baseball

"Television is changing, and Major League Baseball doesn't like it one bit. Currently, Baseball profits on the retransimission rights to different geograhical markets (among other things), but the Slingbox makes geographical considerations less relevant, as users start to watch their home television service anywhere they happen to be. MLB Vice President George Kliavkoff argued the legality of the Slingbox with Rich Buchanan, VP of Marketing for Sling Media, at the Digital Media Summit. Apparently, the MLB feels a cable subscriber in San Francisco who watches a Giants baseball game from his or her laptop during a visit to Chicago is stealing from the Chicago cable operator who paid to transmit MLB games in that city. Except, the MLB conveniently forgets that unless the Giants are playing the Cubs or the White Sox, the Chicago visitor from San Francisco doesn't stand a chance of finding a channel with a Giants game on. Besides, it's not like a traveller should have to rent a place just so they can buy cable or satellite service in another town to watch baseball. So what's the real bottom line? Money. Sling has given the consumer the option of taking the content they pay for at home with them anywhere they go. This means we don't need MLB online, and we don't have to pay for the same thing twice."



This has nothing to do with stealing from local cable operators. Assuming Slingbox users are somewhat equally distributed geographically, this should be a wash between markets. If you add in the fact that if they were not watching via Slingbox, they probably would not be watching at all, it gets to the point that MLB and the cable operators should be thanking Slingbox for giving them the opportunity to reach more eyeballs. Now, if you had a bar or other establishment using a Slingbox to show games that would otherwise be blacked out in their area, that might be an issue, but that is a people issue, not a technology issue.