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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."
Depends on who it needed to appeal to.
If it's management, it only needs to work in the demo and be new and shiny.
If it's the IT dept it only needs to be stable and easily managed. Oh, and do the job.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
-to add insult to injury--proprietary.
Flash is no less proprietary.
My pics.
Um, sure, they are both proprietary, but Flash is much less so. For example, Flash has a 100% supported plugin for Linux and Mac whereas Silverlight doesn't (well, might have an official Mac port, but not Linux), both are 100% compatible with the Windows version, plus Flash has support on some things that Silverlight support will be impossible such as on the Nintendo Wii's Opera browser, and Flash lite for mobile devices. Flash also has a work in progress OSS implementation called Gnash.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Oh really?!? Please post a link to the Sliverlight video file format specification. Here is the one for Flash:
...
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/
Go ahead, surprise me
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Flash is no less proprietary.
I beg to differ.
http://www.openscreenproject.org/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/30/adobes-open-screen-project-write-once-flash-everywhere/
Maybe because Adobe refused to port Flash 8, 9, or 10 to any platform other than Windows and Mac OS?
What in the world are you talking about??? I currently have Flash 10 installed and I'm using Linux. And yes it is officially supported, on the other hand Moonlight, the OSS Slilverlight implementation which is the only way to get it to work on Linux really has no backing from MS and is behind the official Siliverlight plugin.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
How about you take a second to know you're talking about before you talk about it?
Flash Player support for h.264 and The Gnash OSS Flash Player
Face it, Flash isn't as evil as you want it to be. And Microsoft has a hell of a way to go to catch up.
If you spent all day reading Slashdot, you would know this already: --grin-- Free Flex Builder for Unemployed Developers.
Yes everyone has flash, but what they don't tell you is that you'll also need the Swarmcast NexDef browser plug-in.
Check out the not so great review of the flash/nexdef experience: MLB Support Forums
Oh and if you want to also understand this from Microsoft's perspective: Miscosoft SL Team Blog
The CBS March Madness HQ streaming was SilverLight and was a huge success.
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. - Rene Descartes (1637)
Silverlight has a much better programing model the Flash. I have not looked at Flex yet but Flash is nasty.
Sure, the Flash IDE is a toy, the timeline is only useful for simple animation, and Actionscript 1 and 2 are crap, but Flash isn't bad at all if you're working on a pure code-based Actionscript 3 project.
I agree with this. Having used flex/actionscript3 recently it is very easy to learn/use, even on linux - and worked great. Admittedly I was only doing a simple game but as a programmer I was impressed at how easy it was to get up and running.
Find a good text editor that does syntax highlighting for actionscript (even as2 highlighting will work ok) and just use the console-based compiler for generating the swf files.
I never liked flash before - and I'm still not a fan of websites coded entirely in flash, but I'm starting to become a fan of flash programming and the web apps it can potentially produce :)
I did look at silverlight but the linux plugin (moonlight) is a long way from compatibility with the windows one (2 versions behind!), and also I saw the term ".NET" and decided I'd see what flash was like these days...and I'm glad I did. :) The flex SDK (including flex/actionscript compiler) is free so you can develop flash on linux/mac/windows and its free. This is a huge plus for me.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
The current Silverlight 3 preview release supports in addition to the proprietary codecs a pluggable framework for developers that wish to do so to use their own codecs.
As part of the Moonlight effort we now have implemented Vorbis, Theora and ADPCM and have a partial implementation of Dirac almost ready to use.
Our codecs work in both Silverlight 3 and our open source Moonlight implementation.
You mean that "open source" Moonlight that you are leaving full of Microsoft patent timebombs -- Microsoft patent infected code that is being incorporated into Moonlight under the guise of being open because of the Novell Microsoft agreement? The "open source" moonlight that is only safe on Novell's (MS) linux?
Take a walk back to Redmond with that "our open source moonlight" bullshit.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.