Baseball Strikes Out on Slingbox
The Amazon Slingbox pioneered place-shifting, changing the location at which you watched a broadcast. The Slingbox lost a fan in Major League Baseball, which claims that it's not legal to remotely watch baseball games that you've legitimately recorded or bought back at home or the office.
The issue – baseball's broadcast contracts limit viewing by location. While broadcast TV may available and legal to view and record in one area, such as where you live, it may not be available to watch in another local market, such as where you're actually seeing the game via Slingbox.
Maybe Major League Baseball should talk to the National Basketball Association. The NBA is a fan of Slingbox, which it sees as strengthening home team loyalty. Commissioner David Stern even demoed it at the NBA Tech Summit.
Of course the real issue is money. Major League Baseball feels threatened by the Slingbox, as it sells a premium Internet service of its own that lets fans watch any game anywhere for about $100 per year.
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