Early in February of this year, I had posted about RealNetworks and Major League Baseball seeming to “part ways” over the exclusive broadcast rights to all baseball games over the Internet. No firm resolution had come to light since then, from what I could tell.
Today, Real announced that it was filing a lawsuit in federal court to force Major League Baseball Advanced Media to make the games available in the Real format when the season begins. According to the release, another contract was “entered into between the parties in February 2004 that requires MLBAM to make its Internet broadcasts of live baseball games on MLB.com available in RealNetworks media format.”
I just spoke via telephone with Mr. Greg Chiemingo, VP Corporate Communications for RealNetworks, Inc., and here’s the situation from their end: The aforementioned 2001-03 contract had indeed expired on February 7th of this year. According to Mr. Chiemingo, as of February 8th, an agreement was in place for Real to still be an option for Major League Baseball’s Gameday Audio product. There was not an exclusivity clause in this agreement, which had been the case previously. Mr. Chiemingo and I walked through the online process to listen to games online, and when you follow through the system, you are never given the option for anything except using the Windows Media Player to listen to a game. In fact, you don’t have any idea what player is going to load until you click on the link for the particular game you want to hear, and no company logos are present from Microsoft or RealNetworks.
[ed: I have an email in to Major League Baseball Advanced Media, but have not heard back at this time. I will update this post if I hear anything further.]
