MLB.com

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

MLB.com is the official site of Major League Baseball. MLB.com is a source of baseball-related information, including baseball news, statistics, and sports columns. MLB.com is also a commercial site, providing online streaming video and streaming audio broadcasts of all Major League Baseball games to paying subscribers, as well as "gameday", a near-live streaming box score of baseball games for free. In addition, MLB.com sells official baseball merchandise, allows users to buy tickets to baseball games, runs fantasy baseball leagues (both free and paid), and runs auctions of baseball memorabilia.

MLB.com also contains the full, unabridged, official rules of the game, which can be useful for researching the rarely-invoked rules for unusual occurrences.

MLB.com has been providing streaming video since the 2002 season^[1], with only audio available before that. However, in the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Guam and the US Virgin Islands, blackout restrictions apply. A team's local TV station's coverage of a game is blacked out to all users within the local club's home television territory^[2], and in Japan. Contractual stipulations with FOX and ESPN respectively mean that regular season Saturday games scheduled before 1900 EST (beginning 20th May 2006) and Sunday games scheduled after 1700 EST are blacked out throughout the United States. During the post-season, all games are blacked out in the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Guam and the US Virgin Islands. In all other countries and territories, no exclusivity rights have been granted and MLB.com is able to broadcast all games.

MLB.com is able to implement the blackout system using various methods. The subscription process requires a reputable domain suffix to be used - for example an e-mail address used by the user at work - and if the suffix is .ca, the website has reason to believe the user lives and is accessing the site from Canada. However the most reliable method is study of the user's Internet Protocol (IP) address, which is assigned by a user's Internet Service Provider (ISP). The IP can be used to determine the user's location.

[edit] History

The domain mlb.com was originally owned by Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP. In September 2000, Morgan Lewis & Bockius and Major League Baseball entered into an agreement to transfer the domain to Major League Baseball. ^[3]