I have been a Gameday Audio subscriber since MLB.com first introduced the service. As I live in a somewhat remote location without cable or satellite TV, Gameday Audio is my link to the game. I remember a couple of years ago when MLB.com tried to charge an additional fee to listen to post-season games. After a public outcry, they wisely bundled post-season games with the full subscription.

This year though, it appears that MLB.com is trying to further monetize Gameday Audio subscribers by hiding the audio launch links to the post-season games! See for yourself: just visit MLB.com and click Audio & Video > Gameday Audio. You're redirected to a MLB.TV page where you are asked to subscribe to listen to last games of the season. Frankly, I have no idea where to find the "real" Gameday Audio page now and my emails to MLB.com about this issue have been ignored.

I paid to listen to the whole season, yet all of the sudden I have no obvious access to the most important games of the year! I figured out that I can wait until the game has started, then click the tiny audio icon on the home page of MLB.com to get the home broadcase of the game. That works fine, unless I want to listen on my Mac laptop and I want to listen to the away braodcast. If I try and switch between broadcasts on the iBook, it crashes Firefox immediately–every time.

So, where's the love, MLB.com, for your faithful Gameday Audio subscribers? Why did you take away our Gameday Audio page and replace it with another attempt to get into our wallets? Why won't you provide me with easy access to the games when I've already paid to listen to them? Why won't you return my emails? And finally, where's the Mac support? Sheesh.

UPDATE: I just spoke with MLB.com tech support and they showed me another way to find an audio link. Great, but what they couldn't tell me is why the Gameday Audio page has been redirecting to a MLB.TV subscription page since the post-season started. I remain suspicious of MLB.com's motives here.

This post was added on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 4:54 pm and is filed under The Dugout . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.