Baseball's New MLB.TV Players Launches And It Looks Good

The World Baseball Classic kicked off this morning with Japan hosting China at the Tokyo Dome.  It's also a big morning for Major League Baseball's Internet team: It's launching its new MLB.TV web player in beta.

We tried it out this morning and must say, this does look good.  The new player uses Adobe's Flash for video, instead of the previous Microsoft Silverlight.

MLB still hasn't turned on many of the new features, including hi-def streams, DVR and multi-game view, but you can definitely see the improvement in video quality.  On our few years old Mac, it's kind of like watching a real game on TV versus the choppiness of the previous player.

There still are a few glitches here and there, but that's why they are in beta test mode.  It will be very interesting to see if the back-end will be able to handle the opening day rush.  If this beginning is any indication, there should be no reason to worry.