MLB.TV on the Roku

Three and one-half and four. That is what I am going with as the record of the Pirates since I purchased a subscription to MLB.TV last Sunday afternoon. I am generously counting the Sunday game against the Royals as the one-half part of the win total since I had everything up and configured and running in time to watch the last couple of innings of that game. While it remains to be seen whether I will once again have tragically bought into the Pirates at their “52-week high” like last year, I am feeling much better after the weekend games against the Tribe and last night’s Twin’s game. How about El Toro?

When last seen, I was off to research and eventually buy a streaming digital video player to supplant the streaming capabilities of my Sony BDP-N460 (which doesn’t support MLB.TV). There are a ton of players in this space, but going in, my preconception was that this was a two-horse race between Apple TV and Roku. That preconception was validated by my research.  I won’t go into the boring details on the feeds and speeds - there are about a gazillion articles comparing the two product lines. The nutshell that I was able to ferret out was that:

• Both are fine products.
• Apple TV has the cleaner UI and better integration with everything else in the Apple ecosystem. 
• Roku has more content, is cheaper, and is the market leader.

For my needs, the Roku made sense – I don’t have any Apple products. (Don’t read too much into that though. It is not a religious thing with me.) So a quick call to a local Best Buy to see if they had the Roku model in stock that I was looking to buy (the Roku 2 XD) and off I went.

I hadn’t been in this particular store in quite awhile and had a bit of trouble locating the Roku when a sales associate directed me to the shelf. I knew the exact model that I wanted, but it was inevitable – I wasn’t going to get out of that store without getting the standard Best Buy sales associate push about adding some Monster Cables to complement my purchase. Those sales associates must be majorly incentivized to push those cables.

The sales associate was a nice enough young college-age female – very earnest and interested in my requirements. I told her that I was pretty sure that I already had a spare HDMI cable back at the house, but that (even if I didn’t), I buy all of my AV cables from monoprice.com and was a very happy customer of that site (great prices and good product). Then she upped her game and threw down the whole rap about me “really needing a high-quality HDMI cable with gold-plated connectors to adequately handle the high-speed bit rate that the Roku would be be driving”.

Chuckle. If I was an asshole, I might have told her that HDMI is a digital (not analog) connection and that an HDMI cable is either correctly transmitting the bits between the two devices as specified in the HDMI spec or the cable is flat-out broken. But I just smiled and said “no thanks” – there is nothing wrong with a little hustle from a kid trying to do her best and earn a little extra cabbage. Besides, I am not an asshole and I needed to get back to catch AJ Burnett against the Royals.

The Roku is this tiny little appliance that gets configured to talk to your router, connects to a variety of content streamers (like Netflix and MLB-TV) over the Internet and then streams that audio and video content out its HDMI connection to your display device. The appliance has a user interface that allows you to select the channel and programs on that channel that you want to watch and to configure the Roku. All pretty standard stuff.

I was able to get everything setup and working (outside of my universal remote changes) in about 15 minutes. Started at 3:05 PM and was watching the Bucs by 3:20. This included:

• Unpacking the Roku and connecting it to my AV Receiver and TV.
• Booting it and configuring it to connect to my wireless network.
• Subscribing to MLB.TV from my laptop.
• Linking the Roku to my new MLB.TV account.
• Linking the Roku to my existing Netflix account.

No fuss. No muss. A really pleasant user experience. The small size of the appliance allowed me to tuck it neatly into my existing equipment cabinet (even though the Roku documentation recommends against this so as to not degrade the wireless reception).

MLB.TV has a couple of different subscription packages. I was thinking that I was looking at a monthly rate of $19.99 but, alas, that is the rate if you wish to watch baseball on your computer. For hooking up to an Xbox or PS3 or a streaming digital video player like Roku or Apple TV, you need to pony up for the MLB.TV Premium subscription – that is $24.99 a month. (I realize that I could connect my computer to my TV using the its PC input – no thanks). The Premium subscription also allows you to watch games on your smart phone. Oh and you have a choice of home or away telecasts for each game. Here is a link highlighting the features of MLB.TV.

Of course, I had to configure my Harmony One universal remote control to add a new activity for the Roku so I could pitch the Roku remote control in the cabinet with the other half-dozen remotes that the Harmony One replaces.

Picture quality has been a little up-and-down. Over the weekend, the picture quality was very pedestrian for   the series against Cleveland, but it was absolutely stunning in the last night’s game against the Twins. I haven’t had any issues with the stream resetting or dropping, so that is all good. The technical specifications for MLB.TV list a required bandwidth of 3000 kbps to get the HD stream – on my worst days, I am getting  3500 kbps using their bandwidth test so I am good to go on that front. I’ve recently come across an MLB.TV on Roku technical forum and am in the process of foraging that information, so maybe I can tweak my configuration to get a more consistent and pleasing HD picture.

So far, so good!