Major League Baseball Dumps Silverlight For Flash

christian.einfeldt writes "This week, Major League Baseball will open without Microsoft's Silverlight at the plate, according to Bob Bowman, CEO of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, which handles much of the back-end operations for MLB and several other leagues and sporting events. The change was decided on last year but was set to be rolled out this spring. Among the causes of MLB's disillusionment with Silverlight were technical glitches users experienced, including needing administrator privileges to install the plugin (often impossible in workplaces). Baseball's opening day last year was plagued by Silverlight instability, with many users unable to log on and others unable to watch games. Adobe Flash already exists on 99% of user machines, said Bowman, and Adobe is 'committed to the customer experience in video with the Flash Player.' MLBAM's decision to dump Silverlight is particularly problematic for Microsoft's effort to compete with Adobe, due to the fact that 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."

Comments

Re:MSFT Icon is stale.

[kv9]

This is off topic, but Slashdot's MSFT icon is stale.

I agree. I think the new icon should be a flying chair.

Re:Why make the leap in the first place?

[bondsbw]

So basically, either you have to ask Microsoft to support it or maybe write support yourself, which you'll probably then have to distribute to everyone. Yeah, way to be open...

Oh, that's ENTIRELY WRONG of them!!! I can't imagine what would have happened if, say, Linux had been created with such ideals...

So basically, either you have to ask Linus to support it or maybe write support yourself, which you'll probably then have to distribute to everyone. Yeah, way to be open...

Wow... I'm glad that never happened.