MLB Drops Silverlight for Flash

Written by Ryan Lawler

Monday, November 17. 2008 at 04:35 PM EST Post a comment

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Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)'s Silverlight platform has lost one of its marquee customers, with the announcement today that Major League Baseball will use Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE)'s Flash streaming for the next two years of MLB.tv.

Under the deal that is being announced at the Adobe MAX conference today, the league has agreed to use Adobe Flash for live and on-demand streaming of all Major League Baseball for the next two years -- beginning with Opening Day 2009.

In addition to using the Flash Media Player to deliver streams in customer Web browsers, the MLB has also decided to develop a desktop application based on Adobe Air, the company's rich Internet application platform.

Every season, the MLB streams more than 2,500 spring training, regular season, and playoff games on MLB.tv. In 2008, the league streamed more than 12,000 live events, including live games and other events.

The MLB news came on top of a series of other announcements that Adobe has made at its annual developer conference. Earlier today, Adobe announced an upgrade to its Flash media server, opening up features such as dynamic streaming and DVR-like capabilities that will no doubt be used in MLB's implementation during the 2009 season.

The news comes as a big blow to Silverlight, which the MLB used to deliver live and on-demand video streams for the last two years. While the Silverlight platform has been dropped, Swarmcast Inc. will continue to serve up video for MLB.tv, according to Swarmcast vice president of business development Kelly Egan.