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When Microsoft christened their "Flash Killer" technology as Silverlight in April, 2007, one of the reference customers was Major League Baseball. Today Adobe announced that MLB is switching to Adobe’s Flash technology for their online video needs:
MLB.com, the official website of Major League Baseball, and Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced a two-year agreement in which MLB.com has selected the Adobe® Flash® Platform to deliver all of its live and on-demand video offerings beginning in 2009. In addition, MLB.com will provide a downloadable rich Internet application (RIA) built using Adobe AIR™, so baseball fans can access additional features outside the Web browser.
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.
There’s no word on any functional basis for the switch or on financial terms, but Adobe is undoubtedly paying for the privilege.
On the subject of Silverlight, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie blogs about Silverlight 2’s successes (baseball is not mentioned) and what is coming next year in Silverlight 3.
