MLB’s Switch From SilverLight To Flash Leaves Questions

MLB just this week announced that it is switching from Silverlight to Flash for video streaming.  MLB is the most successful online video site with massive profits from baseball fans.  Also MLB is considered a “bellweather” in the online video space.  This is a big move and a major blow to Microsoft.

Many users were not happy with the installation process for Silverlight verses the seamless viewing of flash.

Streaming Media has a post that has them wondering about this deal.

Adobe got a big customer win this week when they announced that MLB.com would move from the Silverlight platform back to Flash for all their live and on-demand video. The two-year deal, which kicks off in 2009, will also see MLB providing a rich Internet application (RIA) built using Adobe AIR that will give viewers access for yet to be announced features outside of a browser. The new rich Internet application will not replace the current MLB TV Mosaic app and will be a completely new piece of software.

That being said, there are quite a few interesting questions one has to ask based on this new deal, which unfortunately MLB won’t answer at this time. For starters, since the majority of content delivery networks still charge more to deliver Flash streaming over Silverlight, is MLB’s cost to deliver video now going up? And if it does, will it have any real impact on the cost of MLB TV? Looking at the MLB.com website, I can’t find any pricing yet for the MLB TV service in 2009. Also, since the Flash Media Server can’t scale as well as Windows Media in a live environment, I think a real possibility exists that MLB could move to a dual-vendor strategy for their video delivery. While Akamai has all of MLB.com’s video business today, I would not be surprised if over time, some of MLB’s traffic was split between Akamai and another provider.