November 17th, 2008
Adobe lands MLB.com deal
updated: Adobe has reportedly landed a Flash deal with MLB.com upending Microsoft’s Silverlight.
Andy Plesser at Beet.tv reports:
Adobe has landed a two-year agreement with Major League Baseball to stream its 2,500-plus spring training, regular season and post-season games live to MLB.com’s 1.5 million subscribers. Games were previously streamed on Microsoft Silverlight, an arrangement announced in August of 2007.
That’s a pretty big coup for Adobe. It was only a little over a year ago that bloggers were patting Microsoft on the back for not only creating a class act video experience on MLB.com but for landing a deal that had enough legs to it to help Microsoft’s Silverlight pick up some strength as a competitor to Flash. And early this year, there were even more accolades when it was reported that Silverlight on MLB.com was playing nice with the Mac.
Plesser reports that details were spilled at a press conference at the Adobe Max conference. (Adobe’s official statement)
update: In a CNET report, Microsoft basically offers no real comment. An executive says, ” Microsoft has appreciated the partnership of MLB.com” and notes that Silverlight has “a great ecosystem that includes more than 150 partners.” Likewise, MLB Advanced Media president and CEO Bob Bowman did not offer details of how Flash outperforms Silverlight. He did say, however that “Flash provides a TV-like experience, you turn it on and it works.”
Bowman added that, whether MLB.com is “serving 20,000 for one game or 250,000 for another game, it’s got to be scaleable over periods of time like nothing else.”
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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