After Microsoft’s Silverlight multimedia technology was unceremoniously dropped by Major League Baseball’s MLB.com in favor of Adobe Flash, Microsoft is coming back with a different sport involving a ball and a bat. Silverlight will power online streaming of the Indian Premier League Championships, an ultra short-form cricket tourney that debuted last year, to much fanfare. This year’s tournament is being held in South Africa.

This new form of cricket game is called Twenty20 and involves two clubs consisting of 11 players competing against each other. The pitching side gets to throw 20 overs (six pitches constitute an over). As a result, a typical game lasts about two-and-a-half hours. The new series, which pays cricket players hundreds of thousands of dollars for a month’s worth of  work, combines colorful uniforms, cheerleaders and jock jams for a TV-friendly showing.

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Since 2005, when Apple re-invented the music business by offering music downloads, much of the industry followed suit. Most attempts, if not all of them, failed. When it comes to mobile apps and digital movie downloads, history is repeating itself. But unlike music, there are no clear winners yet, though Netflix, Amazon and Apple are all vying for the top spot. Today, Variety reports, electronics retail chain Best Buy will join the pack with plans to launch its own digital download service.

Best Buy is said to be talking with companies such as CinemaNow to help run this service. My advice to them is to buy an existing player and get to the market fast — otherwise they’re likely to lose out to Netflix, which is currently the best-positioned to succeed with digital downloading. They’ve got lots of players from which to choose — Vudu and Jaman are the first to come to mind. And Best Buy does have a habit of buying distressed assets, most notably Napster, which it acquired in a move to get into the digital music download business.

Best Buy, like Blockbuster and other companies that have profited handsomely from the sale of DVDs, face a difficult future. Sales of the shiny discs have started to lose steam and the new Blu-ray ecosystem has been hampered by the global recession. But most importantly, consumer habits are starting to shift to consuming video online.

For content delivery startups, partnering with large carriers is the only path to survival in a cut-throat business dominated by Akamai. Edgecast, a Los Angeles-based startup, today announced that it is teaming up with German giant Deutsche Telekom to offer a new service that will use DT’s backbone network. Edgecast is following the footsteps of its rival BitGravity, which had teamed up with Tata Communications to power a global CDN service for Tata.

Carriers like DT and Tata (and Level 3 and AT&T) have the advantage of owning their own infrastructure and thus not having to incur severe bandwidth costs. CDN industry analyst Dan Rayburn had recently reported that the prices at video CDNs had stabilized. Edgecast and BitGravity both specialize in video delivery.