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MLB has a successful streaming service with MLB.tv, but users are limited to viewing out-of-market live games. If you want to watch the stream for your local team, you’ll have to wait until 90 minutes after the game has concluded.
Thus, a without access to their local cable regional sports network has no way of seeing a game as it happens even if they pay for MLB.tv or an add-on cable package like MLB Extra Innings. Here in Philadelphia, this group of blacked-out fans includes not just those without cable, but all DirecTV and Dish customers.
In a new interview with the Wall Street Journal, Manfred now says that he’s focusing on how to resolve the issue of in-market streaming.
“[T]he better part of my workday today was consumed by the topic of in-market streaming,” Manfred tells the Journal. “It is particularly complicated in the context of a media market that is changing so quickly, but I do believe we will get a solution on in-market streaming in the relatively near future.”
When asked if “relatively near future” could mean sometime this year, Manfred answered, “I hope so. I’d like to believe there will be games streamed at some point this year.”
Unfortunately, it’s not clear if this means that people without cable packages will be able to access these streams, or if the streaming might require some sort of authentication to show that you are a subscriber to some specific pay-TV package.
The ultimate goal would be for any local fan to have some way to access the live streams (without having to spoof your DNS or use a VPN to get around MLB.tv’s blackout system).
After all, there’s no reason that an MLB.tv subscriber shouldn’t get access to local games. Perhaps if MLB.tv didn’t insist on editing out the local network’s advertising in place of its own ads, the regional sports networks would be more amenable to in-market streaming.
And anyone who’s watched MLB.tv knows that most ad breaks contain few to no ads, so it’s not like the streaming service would be giving up some sort of revenue goldmine by just showing the full local TV feed with ads.
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RadioShack investor Standard General successfully won approval in bankruptcy court this week to buy up the remaining 1,740 stores, with plans to morph those locations into a new beast with Sprint taking up about a third of each store’s footprint.
It seems the new owners aren’t wasting any time, as the Wall Street Journal reports that the new version of the chain will be unveiled later this month. The stores will look a lot like they do now, as we previously noted — but without large displays dedicated to Sprint’s competitors.
The chain is also culling the clutter, cutting back on laptops, tablets and digital cameras to focus on house-brand chargers, batteries and speakers. It’s still unclear what the new stores will be called, however: While Standard General is going to operate the stores, Salus Capital Partners has digs on RadioShack’s trademarks, patents and customer data.
Unless the two sides can work out a deal to sell Standard General the intellectual property that makes RadioShack Radioshack, the new stores will have to be called something else. RadioSprint? SprintShack? NewOldThing Store?
Who exactly will be running this new operation is also up for grabs — CEO Joe Magnacca resigned yesterday, reports the Dallas Business Journal, after two years of trying to save RadioShack’s sinking ship. A spokeswoman said she didn’t know who will replace him, or if the position will be refilled at all.
RadioShack Is Dead, Long Live RadioShack [Wall Street Journal]
RadioShack CEO Joe Magnacca steps down [Dallas Business Journal]
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Authorities say the woman went to Kmart to return merchandise and in turn, left a nasty deposit for workers, reports the Smoking Gun.
Wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a dump truck and the phrase, “Dropping A Load,” as the police noted, the suspect elicited suspicion after workers smelled a “funky odor” coming from a cardboard box filled with store anti-theft security tags.
That led to the disgusting find of a urine leaking from the box, as well as feces. Police allege she slipped behind a cash register to do her bathroom business, as seen on store security footage.
After approaching the customer service desk to return some items, the complaint says she was shown on video walking to Aisle 1 where she “loosened her pants and squatted down” near the cash register, though store bathrooms were only about 50 feet away. A worker told police that the suspect is a regular customer, “so she should know where the public restrooms are located.”
A minute or so later, she’s “seen reaching for paper towels beneath the counter.” After finishing up, she approached the customer service desk again, completed her return and left the store.
Police used the return paperwork to identify the woman seen in the surveillance video, and confronted her at her home. She denied the dumping, though cops say she was wearing the same color shoes and pants as the perpetrator in the video, and showed police a jacket she was wearing in the store that also matched the jacket seen on the woman in the video.
She was charged with disorderly conduct and two counts of resisting or obstructing an officer. She’s also been ordered to have “no contact with victim store, Kmart” as part of her bond conditions.
Cops: Woman Pooped Inside Box At Kmart [The Smoking Gun]
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The Wall Street Journal reports that the new approach aims to make it easier for consumers who don’t currently have scores to obtain a decent FICO score.
FICO tells the WSJ that the new approach would provide scores to nearly 15 million of the 53 million Americans who currently don’t have FICO scores.
The scores would continue to rely on factors such as payment history, amounts owed, length of credit history, new credit and types of credit used, but would add new factors including consumers’ payment history with their cable, cellphone, electric and gas bills, as well as how often they change addresses and other data.
According to documents obtained from a FICO presentation on the revamped scoring approach, the new data would be furnished by database of telecommunications and utilities providers maintained by Equifax and the National Consumer Telecom & Utilities Exchange, while personal information would be furnished by LexisNexis.
Like the tradition FICO scoring method, the new approach would have a range of 300 to 850. The company says that under the revamped approach, nearly one-third of the newly scored individuals would have a score above 620 – typically the threshold in which credit card issuers and other lenders approve applications.
FICO along with Equifax and LexisNexis have begun a data score pilot to assess the new methods effects on consumers currently without credit scores. The pilot is expected to be completed in the coming months and scores based on the alternative approach made available by the end of the year for use by credit card issuers.
Jim Wehmann, an executive with FICO, tells the WSJ that the increase in consumers with higher scores is a “good indication that this is a process to onboard more consumers and allow them to maintain more creditworthiness.”
While providing more credit options for people is a good thing, basing a consumers’ creditworthiness on utility payments could have a negative affect on consumers struggling to make ends meet month-to-month.
FICO scores are based on five factors: payment history, amounts owed, length of credit history, new credit and types of credit used. The scoring equation takes into account both negative and positive information on a consumer’s credit report; meaning if you pay your bills even a day late it could lower your FICO score.
In 2012, the National Consumer Law Center provided testimony during a House subcommittee hearing exploring the uses of consumer credit data, including the use of utility payments in credit reports.
Chi Chi Wu, staff attorney for NCLC, expressed advocates’ fears that using the additional information would “add millions of news negative reports to the credit reporting system and will actually hame more consumers, especially financially strapped consumers, by creating credit black marks.”
According to Wu’s testimony [PDF], consumers’ sporadic late utility payments are often the result of weather extremes. Consumers who see their bills spike in the winter or summer may not be able to pay those off in full during the season but will over time.
The advocates also counter that using utility bills in FICO scores would actually produce more failing scores than positive one, saying that nearly 55% of consumers previously without scores will end up with a suboptimal or subprime score.
When the issue came up again in legislation in 2013, a coalition of consumer advocates, including the NCLC, Consumers Union, the Center for Digital Democracy and the National Fair Housing Alliance, penned a letter of objection to sponsors. The letter reiterated the concerns of using such data, saying reporting of utility bills would undermine “long-standing protections” developed by state utility commissions across the country to protect consumers when utility bills spike during weather extremes and hurt consumers when they are applying for jobs or looking to buy home or auto insurance.
FICO Gives Millions a Path Toward a Decent Credit Score [The Wall Street Journal]
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The New England Journal of Medicine calls it iced-tea nephropathy in a new letter describing the case, reports Reuters Health, warning others that massive consumption of tea could be responsible for other unexplained cases of kidney failure.
The 56-year-old man suddenly developed weakness, fatigue and body aches, and it seems the source of his ailments was an excessive amount of oxalate, which is a compound found in many foods. You can also get a build-up of oxalates from “juicing” too much, gastric bypass surgery, and eating foods chock full of ascorbic acid like beets, spinach, nuts and strawberries.
Before you swear off any of those foods however, rest assured that the amount you’d have to consume is a heck of a lot — the man said he drank 16 nine-ounce glasses of iced tea a day, resulting in an intake of more than 1,500 milligrams of oxalate per day. That’s well above the advised 40-50 mg limit per day, according to the Academy of Nutrition and Diatetics recommendations.
“If you drink tea once or twice a day, it probably wouldn’t exceed what is the normal range for Americans. But this patient was taking 10 times that amount,” said Dr. Umbar Ghaffa of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, a coauthor of the letter.
Too much oxalate can lead to kidney stones, which in turn can damage the kidney by blocking the flow of urine. Ghaffar told Reuters that this case involved oxalate crystals actually inside the kidney, which generates an inflammatory reaction.
“If that’s not resolved it will cause scarring and loss of the kidney tissue. So that’s what probably was happening in this patient,” he explains.
On the other hand, previous research has shown that people who drink tea in normal amounts can have a lower risk of kidney stones, another professor who was not involved in this case told Reuters.
“But in this case, the person was drinking huge amounts of oxalate,” said Dr. Gary Curhan, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “I would caution people against drinking that much, but drinking a glass or two would not concern me.”
Massive tea consumption linked to kidney failure [Reuters Health]
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The commodities regulator alleges in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that the companies raked in extra cash by artificially lowering the price of wheat by snapping up large amounts of futures contracts, reports the Wall Street Journal.
After droughts damaged crops in Russia, Europe and China in the summer of 2011, wheat prices soared, meaning higher prices for food companies like Kraft. The CFTC says that company uses 30 million bushels of wheat a year to make Oreo cookies, Wheat Thins and other products.
That’s when, according to the CFTC’s complaint, Kraft’s wheat traders worked out a plan to heavily buy December-dated wheat futures contracts, signaling to other traders that food companies and other grain processors would also be into snapping up large quantities of wheat at the end of the year.
Such a move caused the price for Kraft to buy physical wheat before December would go down, because grain companies might’ve thought Kraft didn’t need as much grain for its mills right away, says the CFTC.
But despite buying $90 million of December 2011 wheat futures, which is about a six-month supply of meat, the complaint says the companies never intended to take the order, and only expected that the market would react to their moves by lowering cash wheat prices, which is exactly what happened.
“Kraft executed its plan, and the market reacted as Kraft expected, yielding Kraft more than $5.4 million in futures trading profits and savings from its strategy,” CFTC officials wrote in the complaint.
Kraft and Mondelez declined to comment to the WSJ, citing active litigation.
CFTC Sues Kraft, Mondelez for Alleged Manipulation of Wheat Market [Wall Street Journal]
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