Windows 8 App Fail

Just to warn, this is a bit of a rant. I subscribe to MLB.TV so that my wife and I can watch Red Sox games. We don’t live anywhere near Boston, so it’s our only option. Most of the time, the service is pretty great. There’s the occasional blackout on the weekends, but it still ends up giving us 130-140 games that we would not be able to watch otherwise.

Most of the apps they provide work for the most part, but the Windows 8 app should be shown as a case study on what not to do. If you watch on a Windows RT device, it will crash constantly. On full Windows 8 device, it will crash slightly less often, but still fail frequently. The really fun part? If it crashes 3 times in a short amount of time, they have some sort of connection throttling that blocks access completely. So you get punished for their lousy app. If that isn’t enough, their authentication is poorly implemented, so you have to log in each time the app gets terminated. Which is every time on an RT device, every other time on a full Win 8 device, or after every time the app crashes. All of the scores of the other games are displayed next to the video feed, but you can’t see the score of the current game unless it’s on the streaming broadcast and you get close enough to read the tiny numbers.

I love baseball, but that app is just an embarrassment to the MLB.