Extra Innings Improves

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Filed on April 3rd, 2008 in Baseball, Sports Media ⋅ ⋅

I’ve written quite a bit about my dislike for DirecTV’s Extra Innings package. As a loyal customer and diehard baseball fan, I feel that Extra Innings has been severely lacking in past years.

I will say now, that in 2008, there have been drastic improvements in the Extra Innings package in this first week of the season. Among the biggest improvements is one I’ve been asking for for years — the ability to choose which team’s broadcast you watch.

Instead of just being at the mercy of DirecTV as to which broadcast you get to watch, while the other is inexplicably blacked out, the Extra Innings package now reserves two channels so that you can choose between feeds (if available). Was that so hard? They were already showing the games somewhere, why did this take so long?

I even get to watch Phillies games now. Not that I’m a Philly fan, but I am a huge fan of good announcers, and Harry Calas is as good as it gets. Now I can officially add him to my list of best announcers calling MLB games.

During baseball season, far and away the most searched topics that lead to lukekohler.com are topics that have to do with MLB’s blackout policy. I know I’m not the only one bothered by the way they have treated fans in the past, so I’m pleased to see this improvement.

I still however, can’t watch Padres games out here in Las Vegas, since this is considered their “local market.” Since the Padres games are on local cable in Las Vegas, all of their games are blacked out on the satellite dish. DirecTV does not carry the cable station that the Padres play on, so the games are either blacked out on the visiting network, or not on at all.

Extra Innings is still not perfect, but so far, this is a huge improvement to me. They still need to fix the whole “local market” fiasco, but they seemed to do something to improve their product, which is more than I was expecting. I will continue to talk about this until they get it right, but at least there is some positive news.

Of course, before I go too crazy about this, I need to see how long this lasts. This could be one of those “free preview” weeks for the opening of the season, but so far, this is what we’ve been asking for.

UPDATE: Nevermind.

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