The thwacking sounds of bats striking balls will once again fill stadiums, as Monday is opening day for Major League Baseball. This year, Microsoft will watch from the sidelines.
MLB.com no longer uses Microsoft’s Silverlight to stream games to its 500,000 subscribers. This season fans will watch live and on-demand video via Adobe’s Flash player.
In November, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the league’s tech unit, announced it would discontinue using Silverlight, the browser plug-in that MLBAM had signed up for barely a year earlier. The decision was not insignificant. MLBAM not only runs the profitable MLB.com streaming-video service, the Web’s most successful subscription service, but the group is also influential with other leagues and sporting events. MLBAM handles much of the back-end operations for CBS’ Webcasts of the NCAA Basketball Tournament and this year will do the encoding for the 2009 Masters golf tournament.
ZDnet – Apr 06, 2009:
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Well flash has pretty much caught up with silverlight’s capabilities in the past few months, but it still seems to need a bit more bandwidth to achieve the same quality video, something that might be worth considering thanks to bastards like Warner imposing tiny 40Gb/month bandwidth caps on their internet services.
Flash has the mindshare though, and its was always going to be difficult for MS to compete with that.
Silverlight is nothing less than an attempt to proprietarize the open HTML web which works, by design, on all OSs, with applications that only work on Microsoft Windows.
Flash, not so much, since Adobe does not offer any operating system for sale.
Can you hear it? That’s the sound of M$ becoming even more irrelevant.
Silverlight is pretty close to the software equivalent of a fully-functioning Space Shuttle. It’s an amazing piece of work, one of Microsoft’s best.
Having said that, nobody will use it because 1) it has a steep learning curve, and 2) it was written by Microsoft.
Won’t change one fundamental thing.
MLB.Com Sucks Big Time
Especially for non-Americans, and their customer service is real lousy.
They conned hundreds of dollars from my Father-in-law’s pockets when the Expos left Montreal, and he wanted to watch baseball.
Whenever there is a US city blackout in effect for a Zipcode, it’s also blacked out for The Entire World, like Canada.
HAhahaha I found this choice post on how to fix the NexDef browser:
1 – Find the on/off button on your PC
2 – Turn your PC off
3 – Stop crying with frustration and take a deep breath
3 – Go and find 2 headache tablets
4 – Take the tablets with a glass of water
5 – Go and have a lie down and stop killing yourself trying to find out why Nexdef doesn’t work…ITS BROKEN!!
6 – Much better now eh??
* This is the ONLY way that you will save wasting your time with ridiculous posts by MLB support trying to fix NexDef in order to enjoy the enhanced viewing HD quality streams promised.
If this post helps just ONE person, then I feel it has all been worth it.
Peace to you all.
Total pwnage.
Can you run silverlight on other operating systems like Mac OS X and on other non IE browsers like Opera, Safari, and Firefox?
#8
Yes, No, Yes, Yes.
#8 #9, yes and no. The best, full featured version only runs on Windows, Mac and Linux users get the less feature version.
The general tone on Silverlight seems to be pretty positive, but as a user of MLB.com I have a different view. Last year, when Silverlight was being used, was much worse than previous years at MLB.com
The pictures of the game were very clear, good, but ANY action would be only pictures, bad. Flash video maintains motion better, at least as far as baseball goes. And no, it wasn’t my connection
Now there are many problems with MLB.com. The blackout rules are moronic, and they partner with doubleclick so I had to alter my hosts blacklist. The mlb.com people are not helpful, but what do you expect? Baseball seems to be the least interested of any sport of drawing in new or casual fans.
The only reason they switched back to flash video was because customer comments were overwhelmingly negative.
I kinda don’t care but anytime to stick it to the man… Yeah!
Baseball exemplifies one big thing that is wrong with America.
Microsoft is thinking long term. Sure, they have had high profile users of Silverlight (the Olympics, MLB) that have switched back to Flash but with these high profile events they have gotten millions of users to install Silverlight. Over time they will improve the product and find ways to get it on users desktops like this. Eventually you’ll start seeing more sites making the choice to use Silverlight because its on a lot of computers and Microsoft offers cheaper/better development tools.
The only way to win against Flash is slowly pushing a product into the market, that is exactly what Microsoft is doing.
Its not the 90’s anymore. M$ old slogan of “embrace, extend, extinguish” does seem to be working for them anymore.
#15 – Doesn’t seem to be working is what I meant to say
Thank you MLB. Adobe is one of those conglomerates who has a stranglehold, but with a gentle touch.
Its weird how ZDNet is not running the corresponding story here which is the MLB outage has now lasted longer than the outage that they had at beginning of season last year.
Hmmm funny that.
Its as if zdnet has an ax to grind or something.
Heh pc world is on the story but so far no word from rest of fosstard’o’sphere about MLB’s implosion due to their poor choice in hd media streaming infrastructure.
So how much did they get paid? You do know they did get paid don’t you?