King Kaufman's Sports Daily

The NHL makes a smart deal with Slingbox while MLB fights the future -- and its own fans. Plus: NBA Finals.

Read more: Sports, Baseball, TV, NHL, NBA, Basketball, Major League Baseball, Ice Hockey, King Kaufman, NBA playoffs, Sports Daily, MLB

June 12, 2007 | It's good to see the NHL is out front, leading.

Wait, what? Hey, come back. I'm not drunk or anything.

While Major League Baseball continues its long, drawn-out War on Fans, the NHL, the little league that could -- disappear without too many people noticing, that is -- has done something smart. I'm talking about the NHL's agreement with Sling Media, a company that baseball is fighting.

Of course baseball's fighting Sling Media. Sling Media is offering a product that could improve baseball fans' experience of watching baseball. That's the prime objective of the War on Fans: to prevent that.

Sling Media makes the Slingbox, a set-top box that allows you to watch your TV through your computer anywhere you have a high-speed Internet connection. So you can take your laptop to the corner cafe -- or to Bangkok, Thailand -- and watch "All My Children" on it.

Or a baseball game.

Not if MLB has its way, though. It has been making noises about suing Sling Media, arguing that the Slingbox can be used to get around baseball's antiquated blackout rules.

If you live in Iowa, let's say, you are considered a local market for -- big breath, now -- the Chicago Cubs and White Sox, Kansas City Royals, Minnesota Twins, Milwaukee Brewers and St. Louis Cardinals. That means those teams' games, and we're talking about the games of 20 percent of all major league teams, are blacked out on the Extra Innings package, in cable deals and on MLB.tv. If you're a White Sox fan, you have to watch them on local stations.

And if none of your local stations carry Sox games? Too bad. Who asked you to be a White Sox fan? is baseball's attitude.

But if you were a White Sox fan in Des Moines and you had access to a TV in Chicago, or in South Dakota, which is mostly Twins territory, you could subscribe to Extra Innings, hook up a Slingbox and happily watch the Pale Hose on your computer.

Maury Brown sums up the dispute nicely on his Biz of Baseball site: "Is the technology simply redistributing content you have already purchased? Or, is it much the same as the free-file sharing days of Napster, where content distribution breaks with intellectual property rights?"

Next page: Fighting the future is always a losing battle. Plus: NBA Finals notes