Streaming the Baseball Postseason in Thailand

[suzannegoh]

FWIW, baseball fans might be interested in this as an economical way be able to <legally> stream the World Series and the Playoffs this year.  For subscribers whose IP addresses are outside the the US, MLB’s streaming service (MLBTV) includes all postseason games provided that you hold a season subscription on the last day of the regular season, and the price of such subscriptions are a function the number of games remaining in the regular season.  So if you sign up on the first day of the season it would cost about $110 but it you sign up now (with only 5 games reaming in the regular season) it would be only $3.99 and you would get all of the post season games including the world series.  Probably MLBTV will also offer subscriptions covering the post-season (and only the post-season) once the post-season begins but in past years such subscriptions cost much more money.

Here's the sign-up page:
http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/subscriptions/index.jsp?c_id=mlb&affiliateId=MLBTVTAB

An additional tip is that once signed up don’t use MLB’s viewing software (it works OK on some devices but works very poorly on others), instead google for “MLBTV addon for Kodi” and use that.

Also, unless you want to keep the service at full price for the 2018 season (which would entitle you to watch any teams' games on any day during the 2018 regular season), you'll want to make sure to cancel your subscription after the last game of the World Series or else it will auto-renew in March and your credit card will get billed about $110.

Edited September 27, 2017 by suzannegoh
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[suzannegoh]

As to the matter of whether you'll have enough bandwidth to watch the games without buffering and freezing, that’s hard to quantify without actually trying it because I’m not sure if the servers are in the US or in Asia.  Most likely if have your own DSL or fibre connection it will work out. 

Below is what you need in terms of bandwidth.  MLBTV’s stock software automatically chooses between these resolutions depending upon what bandwidth it detects; with the Kodi  add-on you select between them manually.

224p@30fps (450 Kbps)
288p@30fps (800 Kbps)
360p@30fps(1200 Kbps)
504p@30fps (1800 Kbps)
540p@30fps (2500 Kbps)
720p@30fps (3500 Kbps)
720p@60fps (5000 Kbps)
 

So basically if you have 5Mbps bandwidth available to wherever the servers are the quality should be excellent even on a large screen TV, and if you have 1MB it still should be good enough to watch on the screen of a smartphone.  I find that the 1800 kbps still looks pretty good on a large screen TV but usually I am able to use the 5000kbps setting.

Edited September 27, 2017 by suzannegoh
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