Black outs. And I'm not even drunk.

The Durlam family is now in its second year of having cut the cable cable. Well, technically, we cut the satellite cable. In other words, with the exception of baseball, there was nothing that we were watching regularly on TV that couldn't be had, we felt, via Netflix Streaming, Hulu, iTunes (purchase or rental), or the like, so we decided to try an experiment. We decided to ditch DirecTV and get our "TV" from the ditches of the internet superhighway.

We knew not everything we wanted to watch would be free, but we believed that over the course of a year, we would spend less than we did with DirecTV. As it turned out, we did. In fact, I kept a spreadsheet of all of our TV show / movie purchases, plus music and iPod Touch apps. The bottom line after a year was a little less than what we spent on DirecTV the year prior. So we basically got our music for free and iApps gratis.

Another reason it was easy to butcher the tether: generally speaking, I think that TV's pretty much a time suck. Yeah, there are several shows I've seen over the last few years that I'm genuinely glad I saw (Six Feet Under, Lost, Better off Ted, Pushing Daisies, The Riches, the first couple seasons of Chuck). But the idea of sitting in front of a TV, turning it on, and scanning through channels just to see what's on sounds about as fruitful as playing solitaire with a deck of 51 cards. 

So we now plan our viewing more proactively. We watch what we truly want to watch, or we don't watch anything. In fact, both my wife and I have read far more books in the last year than ever before. Hell, the fact that I've even started this blog could be partially credited to the increased reading I've been doing as reading is a more thought provoking use of time.

Anyway, all that is not really my point. If you're curious what we've done right during this transition, and what we've done wrong, leave a comment—I'd be happy to share.

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My concern is, of course, baseball. Specifically, MLB.com's $100.00 ($120.00 for "Premium") internet-only-viewing package one can purchase to watch, EVERYWHERE!, any and every baseball game being played at any given time (mlb.tv). Except for one that is being played by a team in your "local market," even if that team is playing on the road, and therefore not in its local market. I live in Denver, Colorado. My local market includes the Colorado Rockies. That's my team. The team whose games I really like to watch. But the blackout restrictions prevent me from doing that, unless I am out of town.

But at least I don't live in the midwest (anymore). There are 30 teams in Major League Baseball. If I lived in my hometown of Jefferson, Iowa, I would be unable to watch games involving the Cubs, the White Sox, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Kansas City, or the Twins. If none of those teams were playing each other on a given day, that would exclude me from watching six games involving twelve teams. Nearly half of MLB would be off limits to me.

Finally, I get to that which I've set out to rail. The Blackout. I understand a home sporting event not being televised in a local market if enough tickets haven't been sold. The team wants people in the seats, and I get that. But nearly all of the Rockies games (not just home games) are televised on FSN Rocky Mountain (soon to become ROOT Sports) or ESPN or FOX, whether they sell enough seats or not. Now, I do have an antenna hooked up to my TV, so I could watch a Rockies game televised on FOX, but I am unable (unwilling might be a better term, I suppose) to watch ROOT Sports or ESPN (ESPN3 notwithstanding).

Why doesn't MLB.tv offer a non-blackout package? As far as I can tell, the reason for the MLB to black me out from viewing a Rockies game is that ROOT Sports makes them. Because ROOT wants me to watch it traditionally. And I just do not get that. Why can't they offer their feed to MLB.tv just like they do to Comcast, DISH, DirectTV, Cox, and others? Let me watch it on my computer, but make me watch the commercials. I won't mind. You might think me crazy, but in our new set-up, I don't see many commercials, and I actually kind of miss them. Well, some of them, anyway.

When I watch a game that I'm allowed to watch on MLB.tv, and it goes to commercial break, nine times out of ten I get a generic screen with an MLB.tv logo and the text: Commercial Break in Progress. Are you kidding me? The sponsors who advertise during Rockies games are now missing me entirely. Yeah, I know they probably don't care about one guy, but more and more people are starting to get their video this way, so it would behoove them to start worrying about it.