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March 15, 2008
MLB.com 2008
MLB.com 2008: A behind-the-scenes look at the baseball site... unique info here. MLB.com had a significant investment in Windows Media assets and systems, and FMS3 was not yet available, so they upgraded the clientside component from Windows Media Player to Microsoft's new Silverlight plugin. They also had "a huge codebase in Flash that is already stable and we were able to reuse it significantly," so the result is a Silverlight video asset surrounded by Flash data and interactivity. Communication between plugins is handled by JavaScript messaging. Frog Design built the basic demo, but the approval process of the project was apparently handled in PDF. Microsoft offered "a dedicated team of people" for the project, and certainly reaped some headlines out of it. Aside from bypassing problems with the older Windows Media Player, the site doesn't seem to have actually changed much. (By the way, the MLB Gameday application is already running, an RIA for exhibition baseball... you can retrieve pitch locations for last nights Dodgers vs Padres game in Beijing, for instance.)
Posted by JohnDowdell at March 15, 2008 05:45 PM
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Comments
As an avid MLB fan, I've loved their Flash stuff over the past couple of years. Sadly (at least for Spring Training), the Silverlight video and audio seems to have a number of issues (it disconnects me all of the time) at the moment (FF 2, latest Silverlight plugin). I find myself using the "Old Media Player" -- with a simple Windows Media Player embed -- because it works much better at the moment.
Posted by: Charlie Szymanski at March 15, 2008 07:32 PM
Have faith. If Flash is a better technology, it would come back and dominate MLB.
[jd sez: Check out the site, it already is.]
Posted by: Tangent at March 16, 2008 05:05 PM
I interviewed for their front-end group a couple of years ago, and I asked why they were using WMV instead of Flash video, given the amount of Flash they used, and the advanced nature of their work with it.
It came down to DRM. There was a big debate the other week, about how evil it was that Adobe was going to enable DRM in FMS. And I made the point to someone (not here, I don't think), that without giving customers like MLB what they wanted, they'd go to Silverlight, or someone else who would. This is a prime example.
Now, no developer thinks it's ideal to have Silverlight and Flash, taped together with a bit of JS. It's a pain to take care of, plus you're requiring 2 plug-ins on your site. Sooner or later, they'll commit to one or the other, which should be interesting.
Posted by: PaulC at March 17, 2008 01:13 PM