Silverlight: In at Netflix, out at Major League Baseball

Not long ago, I noted that Netflix has adopted Microsoft's Silverlight as its streaming media platform for Apple's Macintosh, but today, Major League Baseball announced that it has switched from Silverlight to Adobe Flash for its live and on-demand video streams, starting in 2009 and for at least the next two years. This comes after the National Football League chose Flash earlier this year to stream its games, including the interactive multi-camera player used by both NFL.com and NBC. Neither MLB nor the NFL pointed to technical deficiencies in Silverlight as the reason that they adopted Flash, and Major League Baseball's statement that it was adopting Flash "for the next two years" indicates that the reason for the switch may have been based on business, not technical, reasons, and could be revisited down the road.

A big win for Silverlight--from the last place you'd expect

Microsoft's Silverlight has played a poor runner-up to Adobe's Flash in terms of player installation and usage ever since it was introduced, even with Silverlight powering NBC's Olympics video last summer. Today, however, Silverlight got another big win, and it's not something that will last for only two weeks. According to Engadget, Netflix just announced that it will finally bring its "Watch Instantly" streaming video service to the Mac, using Silverlight. One reason that Netflix went for Silverlight over Flash is Microsoft's Digital Rights Management platform, called Play Ready. I suspect that another reason is that Microsoft doesn't charge for players or servers, while Adobe still charges quite a bit of money for servers. Having Microsoft software as the preferred streaming platform for Macs is a bit of a shocker, but it apparently makes both business and technical sense for Netflix.