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CNET News posted an interesting article yesterday about how Major League Baseball (MLB) did a u-turn on Microsoft Silverlight as their choice for video distribution and went back to Adobe Flash instead. So why did the MLB go back to Flash Player as their vehicle for streaming live and on-demand video this season?

Firstly, Silverlight was considered too unstable. On the opening day of the 2008 baseball season last year, there were some high-profile glitches with Silverlight, preventing users from seeing games. Problems persisted for several days. The rift between Microsoft and MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) began to grow and still hasn’t stopped, said sources, adding that lawyers for each side are still arguing over Microsoft’s responsibility.

But the move back to a Flash video player was more than just reliability over its competitor. Here are some quotes from Bob Bowman, CEO of MLBAM on why Adobe Flash was better suited to streaming video to the homes and offices of 500,000+ baseball fans compared to Microsoft Silverlight.

Q: How much better is your video player this year?

“Nobody has seen true high-def before on the Web. (With this year’s player) you can put it on any screen you want, there’s no degradation at all. It has all the bells and whistles, picture-to-picture, DVR-quality pause, rewind, fast-forward, real-time highlights. The meat-and-potatoes of it of course is the picture quality itself and it is eye popping.”

Q: What did you see in Flash that impressed you?

“You see several things. You see a high-grade product that’s in some form on 99 percent of the browsers. You’ve got something that’s got mass usage. Secondly you see with Adobe a company committed to the customer experience in video with the Flash Player. We see a partner that continues to invest in their product. They have the same desire that we do. They want the Flash Player to be the best thing anybody has ever seen and we want that. When you partner with people like that, it’s not a philosophical discussion. We know where we want to be, now how do we get there.”