First Season On The Air
MLB Home Plate launched at the start of the Major League Baseball season in 2005, ready to entertain the new customers who bought XM to hear their favorite teams. It launched with a full lineup, and several guests immediately. On day one of broadcast, José Canseco made the claim to his former manager turned Home Plate host Kevin Kennedy that Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire took steroids during the 1998 Home Run Chase. XM Satellite Radio even put out a press release about the broadcast. Around launch time, XM announced that they had signed Cal Ripken, Jr. to do a Saturday mid-morning show on Home Plate. The channel was aided throughout the season as XM's subscriber growth prediction exceeded what they expected, with retailers claiming that 15-17% of people who signed up for XM did it for baseball.
The end of the 2005 season was especially active as the satellite company carried both feeds of both teams during the post-season games, and four feeds per world series game (which included a promotion where XM gave out free Roady XTs to all who attended the first World Series 2005 game).
Read more about this topic: MLB Network Radio
Famous quotes containing the words season and/or air:
“The art of medicine in the season lies:
Wine given in season oft will benefit,
Which out of season injures.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)