Major League Baseball Dumps Silverlight For Flash 388
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."
Re:Why make the leap in the first place? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Why make the leap in the first place? (Score:5, Informative)
-to add insult to injury--proprietary.
Flash is no less proprietary.
Re:That's like saying (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why make the leap in the first place? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/ [adobe.com]
Go ahead, surprise me
Re:Microsoft releases Silverlight 2.0, nobody care (Score:1, Informative)
Yeah - looking at the stat owl site mentioned above, silverlight is nowhere near flash in overall usage [statowl.com]. Not sure why they insist on trying to get into this market other then that it is Microsoft!
Re:Why make the leap in the first place? (Score:3, Informative)
I wish the article would have explained why MLB went with Silverlight in the first place. What kind of arm-twisting (or hooker-and-blow-providing) could MS have possibly done to convince a company to take such a major financial gamble? For the most part, Silverlight is largely unproven tech and--to add insult to injury--proprietary. Can someone explain the appeal?
Also, most people don't have or use or even WANT to use Silverlight.
Re:HTML 5? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why make the leap in the first place? (Score:5, Informative)
Flash is no less proprietary.
I beg to differ.
http://www.openscreenproject.org/ [openscreenproject.org]
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/30/adobes-open-screen-project-write-once-flash-everywhere/ [techcrunch.com]
Re:That's like saying (Score:1, Informative)
Flash has a 100% supported plugin for Linux and Mac whereas Silverlight doesn't
Wrong.
Mac version: http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/ [silverlight.net]
Linux version: http://mono-project.com/Moonlight [mono-project.com]
Flash has support on some things that Silverlight support will be impossible such as on the Nintendo Wii's Opera browser
Wrong. The Wii only supports Flash 7. Almost all flash apps check for version 9 or 10 right off the bat so Flash is useless on the Wii.
[Silverlight can't compete with] Flash lite for mobile devices.
Wrong. Silverlight mobile is coming along quite nicely. [silverlight.net]
Please research things instead of just making a bunch of stuff up and somehow getting +5 informative for it.
Re:Why make the leap in the first place? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Why make the leap in the first place? (Score:4, Informative)
Flash Player support for h.264 [adobe.com] and The Gnash OSS Flash Player [gnashdev.org]
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.
Re:has anyone seen high quality flv? (Score:3, Informative)
A Core 2 Duo ain't all that impressive, youngster...
Free Flex Builder for Unemployed Developers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why make the leap in the first place? (Score:3, Informative)
Misleading Article... Not 100% Flash (Score:5, Informative)
Check out the not so great review of the flash/nexdef experience: MLB Support Forums [mlbsupport.com]
Oh and if you want to also understand this from Microsoft's perspective: Miscosoft SL Team Blog [silverlight.net]
The CBS March Madness HQ streaming was SilverLight and was a huge success.
Screw Flash (Score:3, Informative)
I really don't care what technology they use, just make it work.
Today, the audio of the first 2 innings of the Red Sox game were replaced with a high pitching whining noise. Opening day and all I could do is turn off the sound.
M
Re:Holy Security Hell Batman... (Score:2, Informative)
flash is slow in window mode because it doesn't use video acceleration. in full screen it does so cpu usage is moot.
flash supports h264 playback and mp3/aac so it supports the latest video standard, highest quality possible right now.
You can create content with a lot of software products out there and use maybe the best encoder possible for free, as it's open source.
With Silverlight you can only work with WMV or Microsoft technologies and you have to pay royalties and buy the video codec.
You're blocking yourself into a closed source standard which Microsoft may choose to drop at any time, without any real advantage (drm is not advantage because there are tools out there that strip the DRM)
Silverlight can slow your computer just as well as flash. Being a .net extension or whatever developers will be able to really abuse your system, much more easier than with Flash. You just don't see Silverlight out there because they don't care to code for it.
here's a tip for you. Open your silverlight player, run a movie. This one is decoded with hardware acceleration, with overlay mode and all the tricks possible to keep the cpu usage low.
Now open another window and run another movie at the same time. That one will be decoded in software because you already use the hardware with the first movie.
Now open a third movie and so on... you'll see the cpu go nuts.
I've just tested playing HD youTube movies at the same time on a Q6600 processor, all at stock. 40% with two movies, 45 with 3, 51 with 4, 65 with 5 movies and it started to stutter, maybe because i don't have enough bandwidth.
So I don't know, maybe you shouldn't build computers if you don't know how.. or something like that.
Re:Why make the leap in the first place? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:HTML 5? (Score:3, Informative)
you must be new here, or have a short memory
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/03/31/0039238.shtml [slashdot.org]
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/03/31/200201.shtml [slashdot.org]
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/04/20/2112208.shtml [slashdot.org]
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/05/02/0049225.shtml [slashdot.org]
http://www.itpro.co.uk/605142/ms-ooxml-a-format-without-a-future [itpro.co.uk]
http://www.itpro.co.uk/605496/iso-rejects-anti-microsoft-office-open-standards-appeal [itpro.co.uk]
"The International Standards Organisation has rejected appeals from four countries to deny Microsoft's Office Open XML backing as an international standard.
OOXML won approval from the ISO in April, following a controversial fast-track review process which was plagued with claims of voting irregularities, and accusations of technical flaws in the standard itself."
page 2 of the last link is a hoot as well http://www.itpro.co.uk/605142/ms-ooxml-a-format-without-a-future/2 [itpro.co.uk]
"ISO ratification was achieved at considerable cost. The reputation of the ISO was compromised, as was that of Microsoft. ISO ratification was achieved amid widespread allegations of misbehaviour and undue political influence, which was noted by the likes of the European Commission. Neelie Kroes, the EU Commissioner, recently said: "If voting in the standard-setting context is influenced less by the technical merits of the technology but rather by side agreements, inducements, package deals, reciprocal agreements, or commercial pressure ... then these risk falling foul of the competition rules."
The process has also adversely affected the work of the ISO. Martin Bryan, a senior ISO/IEC Convenor, who reported that the fast-tracking of OOXML "has made it almost impossible to continue with our work within ISO. The influx of P members whose only interest is the fast-tracking of ECMA 376 (OOXML) as ISO 29500 has led to the failure of a number of key ballots."
"More than one commentator was reminded of the famous remark by Tom Lehrer, mathematics lecturer and sixties satirist, who said that "satire became obsolete the day that Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.""
Do I need say any more
Re:Why make the leap in the first place? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Open source moonlight? (Score:5, Informative)
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.