Major League Baseball Dumps Silverlight For Flash
On Tuesday, Adobe and Major League Baseball Advanced Media announced a two-year deal in which Flash will be the technology of choice for MLB.com's entire catalog of live and on-demand video programs, starting in 2009.
As part of the agreement, MLB.com will offer subscribers a downloadable Rich Internet Application (RIA) built on Adobe AIR, a cross-operating system runtime, to extend the baseball viewing experience to features outside the browser.
Major League Baseball Advanced Media has been using Silverlight to deliver game video streams of 1.2 megabits per second since April 2007. Things went smoothly until July of this year, when MLB.com subscribers began reporting choppy video performance when using Silverlight to view games.
Silverlight, a subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) system that powers Windows Vista, is Microsoft's attempt to trump Adobe's Flash technology by offering better-looking, more advanced display and interactive functionality, as well as superior tooling support.
The jilting of Silverlight comes at a time when Microsoft has been touting the recent successes of Silverlight 2, which include high-profile gigs as the multimedia technology for the Beijing Olympics and the Democratic National Convention.