Written by Chris Albrecht
Posted Monday, November 17, 2008 at 1:26 PM PT

MLB to Silverlight: You’re Out!

Major League Baseball announced today that it has selected Adobe’s Flash video platform to deliver its live and on-demand video for the next two years starting in 2009. This is a blow to Microsoft and its Silverlight video technology, which up until now had been powering MLB video. The MLB.TV service got off to a rough start this year as the service went on the blink for paying subscribers during the opening two days of the season because of a problem with its Mosaic media player. We don’t know if this issue was Silverlight-related, though the problems didn’t seem to stop MLB.TV from becoming a hit with fans. Major League Baseball Advanced Media Group is responsible for about $450 million in revenues, with half of that coming from paying subscribers to MLB.TV.

From a press announcement about the switch, we were able to learn a few more details about the service:

MLB.com streams live every Major League spring training, regular season and postseason game, more than 2,500 annually, via its out-of-market subscription product, which has seen more than 1.5 million total subscribers since its debut on Opening Day 2003. Since that time, fans have accessed more than 1.8 billion streams of live and on-demand multimedia offerings on MLB.com, representing nearly 200 million hours of participation. By the end of 2008, MLB.com will once again stream nearly 12,000 live video events, including Major League Baseball games and thousands of events for its various business partners.

MLB’s move to Flash is also a bit surprising given the success Silverlight enjoyed during the very high-profile Olympic games. People groused (myself included) about the time-delayed content and installing a plug-in, but the video itself performed quite nicely. Though to be fair, Flash is already installed on more than 98 percent of Internet-connected desktops, and 81 percent of videos viewed online worldwide are streamed using Flash. So, Adobe has that going for them.

Microsoft is fast-becoming the Redmond-headed stepchild of the online video world. The National Football League also chose Flash to stream its games earlier this year.

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Topic: Hitlines, Networks & Studios, Picks, Software

Comments (8)

What does “a problem with its mosaic” mean?

Jeffrey — 2:28 PM on November 17, 2008 Reply
Mosaic is MLB.TV’s downloadable media player. This post has been updated to clarify.

Chris Albrecht, NewTeeVee — 2:54 PM on November 17, 2008 Reply
Let’s hope that Adobe gets Flash working on iPhone and BlackBerry by spring training next March. Otherwise it will be interesting to see if they figure out how to work this content in with their current apps for these devices.

NHL.com went to Flash for a lot of their Home page this fall and now you cannot get real time game information easily on either of these devices.

But then again, maybe we’ll have SlingPlayer for BlackBerry available and I can watch games via my Extra Innings subscription from my cable TV provider. (I have watched some games via SlingPlayer for Symbian on an N95 but the battery dies after five innings.) And you probably only want to do this over a WiFi connection or the mobile carriers’ backhaul will break down.

Jim Courtney — 3:13 PM on November 17, 2008 Reply
Ahh, now I see why there wasn’t any mention of MLB in this post by Microsoft about the succes of Silverlight:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/16/update-on-silverlight-2-and-a-glimpse-of-silverlight-3.aspx

Johan — 3:17 PM on November 17, 2008 Reply
I wonder if Adobe is subsidizing MLB for their operating costs in running the Flash video platform and whether that played a part in MLB’s decision to go with Flash?

Jonathan Wong — 7:10 PM on November 17, 2008 Reply
A1 IS COOL

ANY OBJECTIONS????????

Susi — 5:21 PM on November 18, 2008 Reply
Why do users complain about installing another plug-in? Doesn’t the MLB DH video stream also require the Swarmcast NexDef plug-in?

Lucas — 11:33 AM on April 7, 2009 Reply
Why do users complain about installing another plug-in? Doesn’t the MLB HD video also require the Swarmcast NexDef plug-in?

Lucas — 11:34 AM on April 7, 2009 Reply

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