Streaming Video Blog

Major League Baseball took another step in proving its technical superiority over the other three major sports leagues Wednesday, by connecting its wired MLB.TV subscription package with its At Bat iPhone application.

Beginning Wednesday, MLB will stream every single regular and postseason baseball game to fans via the $9.99 iPhone and iPod Touch application it initially released last year. Customers who already subscribe to MLB.TV and MLB.TV Premium packages–its online baseball viewing service–can now watch any game live from their phone or computer. The games will be streamed over the iPhone or iPod’s Wi-Fi connection or 3G network. Games can be paused and rewound while playing.

Just after the iPhone OS 3.0 update was released in June, MLB added the feature that any purchasers of the At Bat app would get one free streamed game per week chosen by MLB, no MLB.TV subscription required. It took a little over a month to add the MLB.TV package, which streams 15 live games at a time.

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Neflix is extending its subscription service for movies and television show to Apple’s iPhone platform, according to a widely-echoed MultiChannel News article. The new iPhone operating system (available for all versions of the hardware) follows an open video streaming standard, so developers like Netflix can develop apps for streaming video straight to the iPhone, where previously the only native video app was YouTube.

Other commentators have correctly pointed out that Apple and AT&T are unlikely to let Netflix stream movies over AT&T’s wireless cellphone network. They assume that any Netflix app for the iPhone would be restricted to WiFi, but that ignores a third possibility: an offline mode that obviates the need for a connection in order for movies to play.

Slacker’s Apple-approved app and Spotify’s possibly-to-be-approved app each include a caching feature that lets you listen to hours and hours of music while offline, with nary WiFi nor cellphone connection in range.

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CBS pushed out a streaming video player for iPhones and touchy iPods, with smooth navigation of all the content available on TV.com, including for the first time impressive full-length episodes of some—but not most—shows.

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One of the more overlooked features of the new iPhone 3.0 is support for a new open standard for live video streaming over HTTP, which promises to open up standards-based video broadcasting to a wide audience while giving mobile users an optimized picture as they roam between WiFi and mobile networks.

At the March unveiling of iPhone 3.0, Apple only dropped a subtle hint about new streaming video features in the new operating system (literally limited to writing “streaming video” on the slide of other features, below), leaving out any details about how it would work and not even mentioning the feature in any detail in the presentation.

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