MLB.tv FAIL

This MLB.com is titled, "MLB.TV, season off to flying starts." Excerpts:

We can all agree that this was worth the wait, as always, and what is making it even more fun this time is being able to watch it live in crystal-clear, staggeringly spectacular HD on your computer via MLB.TV Premium.

...

We can all agree that this was worth the wait, as always, and what is making it even more fun this time is being able to watch it live in crystal-clear, staggeringly spectacular HD on your computer via MLB.TV Premium.

...

Beau Frusetta is a Red Sox fan in Phoenix and he also uses it to follow his team in a way no other broadcast capability can match. It is anywhere-baseball, loaded with interactive functionalities that are beyond your average TV set's capabilities. They just don't make those with Fantasy trackers built in or constant delivery of highlights.

"Having an HD stream available from MLB.TV this year is amazing -- some other professional sports leagues should take note," he said. "I think what most people don't realize is that you can hook your computers up to those lovely 40-inch-plus LCD HD TVs that everyone has these days and stream HD content from the internet in full screen to their TVs. For $20 a month, that's a smoking deal to be able to see all the Red Sox games that I miss during the year being in the Phoenix market. It's also a much better deal than you'd get on some other services like satellite/cable, and you can take it with you if you have a laptop -- not much better than that!"

Staggeringly spectacular!

And these are -- not kidding -- the top three user comments as of 9:02 a.m. ET:

commenter wrote: 2009 MLB.TV opening day...This is the classic result of marketing people and senior management making lofty promises about product development, and then trying to adhere to an unrealistic deadline and/or budget. Instead of building the system properly, things get done half-a**ed. And I paid $80 for this. 4/7/2009 8:52:49 AM

hannah_kali wrote: Wow, that article was a piece of garbage. The service provided so far this season has been TERRIBLE!!! Don't subscribe. What a waste of money. We've been waiting 8 hours for archive footage that was promised in 45 minutes. No response from MLBtv support staff. They have a long way to go to make it up to current customers. Unbelieveable that they'd publish an article like this... 4/7/2009 8:39:27 AM

commenter wrote: I'm sorry to say this, but the 2009 season got off to a tremendous failure for MLB.TV. In its current state, MLB.TV is almost completely unviewable when using the NextDef plug in, which is the prerequiste for using the premium services. I can understand a few wrinkles early in the season, but not a complete collapse of the servers, leading to out of sync audio, stuttering and/or frozen pictures, even at the lowest quality levels. If this turns out to be a browser or operating system problem, then the technical staff and the programmers will really have egg on thier faces. I say this as a programmer for a major European production house, which streams European football in high quality, besides doing the television production. 4/7/2009 8:31:49 AM

I took a screen grab because I wonder, after the execs at MLB.com find out, how long they'll keep the comments section open.

POSTSCRIPT: Fail blog -- it's been pretty incredible this past week.