The real landmark sign that the new season is rapidly approaching, particularly as a British fan eager to devour as many games by as many teams as possible, is when MLB.com announces the prices for their multimedia packages.

If you haven’t logged on to MLB.com yet in the last twenty hours or so, take a quick peek at the Subscriptions section, yell in excitement, and then make your way back here.

The headline news is that, while prices for everything else seem to be going through the roof, baseball fans can enjoy the luxury of a price freeze. All packages will cost the same in 2008 as they did in 2007. In fact, to a large extent the service as a whole has stayed the same.

Last year saw an overhaul of the MLB.com services. What was the premium package in 2006 (’All Access’ as it was known) effectively became the middle option for baseball fans, usurped by a souped-up service bringing increased picture quality (streaming at 700K compared to the standard 400K) and the mind-boggling Mosaic feature. Most people who wanted the upgrades were happy to pay the extra money for them, while fans who were more than content with the previous service found themselves with a relative bargain on their hands.

In comparison, 2008 appears to be more of a consolidation year than one of great innovation, but that’s far from a criticism. The service MLB.com provides is excellent and there was no need for drastic changes. The age-old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies here, although that’s not to say that the folks at MLB.com haven’t made a few improvements along the way.

The main technical change is an “enhanced video player” for MLB.TV and MLB Premium, which uses Microsoft Silverlight. Anyone who has taken a look at MLB.com’s BaseballChannel.TV over the off-season will be familiar with this new layout (this still gives you option to use the old-style media player, so that will probably also apply with MLB.TV). Apart from this, the only noticeable changes are in the Premium package where the picture quality has reached “TV Quality” standard.

Let’s look at the options one-by-one (leaving aside the Mobile deal):

• Gameday Audio enthusiasts get the same deal as last year: ‘radio’ commentary of every regular season and postseason game, with the option to choose either the home or away feed, for just £8 ($14.95). If you’re not in the position where you can splash out on one of the .TV packages, this really is a great substitute. Very few computer/internet set-ups (if any) will have any problems in playing the audio (if memory serves, it streams at about 12Kps) and listening to the commentary is a great way to enjoy a baseball game. Just like cricket, it’s a sport that suits the radio medium and lots of people who buy one of the .TV packages (myself included) also listen to many games this way over the course of the season.

• MLB.TV: the next step up is the basic MLB.TV package, although ‘basic’ is a misnomer in this context. For just £47 ($89.95), British fans have the ability to watch any game they want to during the regular season. Every single regular season game is available to watch live, while you can use the archive function to watch any game at a later date, the latter being extremely useful when it comes to living with the time difference. The video for MLB.TV once again streams at 400K, which may not be TV quality but is perfectly watchable. MLB.TV subscribers also get the Gameday Audio package thrown in, plus the ability to watch the “Condensed Games” each day. The Condensed Games are nine to ten minute highlight packages of every single game, making them a great way to follow your team if you don’t have the time to watch all 162 games from start to finish.

• MLB.TV Premium: probably the greatest sports package on the Internet. Subscribers get all of the MLB.TV goodness, but with the option to watch superior picture quality and the MLB Mosaic feature which allows you to watch six games at once. The Premium footage streamed at 700K last year has been upped to 800K and 1.2MB “TV quality”. This will cost British fans around £62 ($119.95) for the season.

(Note: banks may charge an overseas transaction fee, but this is generally just £1 or so)

Those are your options, with the ability to pay by month as well (naturally this works out to be more expensive over the course of the season). Which package you go for will be dependent on a variety of factors, with money unfortunately likely to come near the top of your considerations. Each package is fantastic value though.

My one word of warning would be in regards to choosing between MLB.TV and Premium. The Premium extras are heavily dependent on the capabilities of your internet set-up. I spent the extra £15 to get the Premium subscription last season and really shouldn’t have bothered. Watching games at 700K (as it was then) compared to the 400K did produce a notable improvement in the picture quality. When it wasn’t sat there buffering, that is! I can’t remember a single time when I didn’t end up switching to the 400k feed partway through because it became unwatchable, and Mosaic unsurprisingly wasn’t much better. Premium subscribers can still choose to watch the 400K feed instead, so it wasn’t a case of having to buy a whole new subscription, but it did feel like a waste of money to have paid for extra features that I couldn’t really use. Of course, whether you will experience the same depends on a whole host of factors (internet provider, copper wire or optic fibre cables etc). The additions you get for your money are certainly worth the extra £15 if you can make use of them. MLB.com provides a link to check your bandwidth, but this doesn’t tell the whole story so it’s worth doing a bit of investigating before making your decision.

It’s no exaggeration to say that these services have completely transformed the way in which international baseball fans can follow MLB. Here in Britain, we are not affected by the blackout restrictions so we genuinely have the option to watch all 2,592 games live. The time difference does reduce the amount of games many fans are able to watch live (probably more than half take place in the early hours of the morning here), but access to the archives reduces the impact this has. And in fairness there is normally a good selection of U.S. day games (therefore GB evening games) to watch each week in any case, especially over the weekend. I publish a weekly guide to these games every Monday evening here at BaseballGB during the course of the season.

Having free choice on the games you watch is probably the biggest benefit with this service. Whether you want to watch all of your favourite team’s games, or you want to catch a fair number of games by all thirty teams, the choice is yours. Such freedom is essentially the raison d’etre of the Internet (Web 2.0 etc) and MLB has embraced this more effectively than any other sport.

If there is a slight negative here, it’s the fact that MLB.com’s Customer Service seems to have a poor reputation, particularly with international fans. Reportedly the only way to get a response is by phoning them (e-mails are often ignored apparently) which can of course be a costly business. I can only go by my own experience as someone who has been a subscriber for three years (2008 will be my fourth). Personally, I cannot comment on the helpfulness of the customer support because I’ve had no reason to contact them over this time. Yes, the picture can chop up every now and then, but most people with a Sky digital dish have to put up with this as well when the weather gets bad etc. On the whole, I have been extremely pleased with the service and can strongly recommend it.

I will certainly be subscribing again for the coming season and cannot wait for the games to start. Fortunately, with plenty of spring training games and access to the 2007 archives included in the subscription, you don’t have to wait until 25 March. The only problem with MLB.TV is that it makes you feel there aren’t enough hours in the day!

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