MLB.TV is Major League Baseball's online service that offers live streams and archives of all games over the internet, available as a regular and a premium service. The premium subscripers get high-definition resolution and a special game summary called condensed games that only show the final pitch of every at-bat, allowing baseball fans with time contrains and abroad to keep track of their favorite teams and players. Or so they thought.

After sustaining a few weeks without any condensed games at all to start the season, the 15-25 minute long condensed games - now also available to non-subscribers for free - were changed to a new format at the end of May. Then, the summaries changed into extended highlight reels between five and eight minutes long, showing only selected at-bats - usually run-scoring plays or strike-outs - often skipping several innings completely and being generally perceived as rather confusing. MLB.com claims that change was made because of customers complaining about condensed games being too long, but some people suspect it had more to do with a new application for iPhone users that was launched recently. Customers have voiced their dissatisfaction in a thread in the mlb.tv support forum that extends over several pages (and that apparently had to be edited to remove additional pages worth of explicit comments), but have yet to receive any substantial feedback about if or when the format will be changed back or even whether their criticism has been acknowledged by MLB.

Considering that premium subscribers had paid about $110 for this year's service and that MLB would probably like them to renew their subscription for about $90, this behavior by MLB is rather puzzling. Leaving the question of alienating of your most loyal fan base aside for a moment, I have to wonder if there really is more money in iPhone users paying $9.99 for an app than in subscribers spending nearly ten times as much on a yearly basis?

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