Digital Media

Some subscribers of Major League Baseball's streaming-video service are complaining that the new player, powered by Adobe Flash, isn't ready for the big leagues.

After receiving plenty of favorable reviews from technology blogs, some MLB.com subscribers have complained about stuttering and stalling video while watching on Monday, opening day for baseball. Some of the same problems continued on Tuesday, according to reports. Subscribers of MLB.com's GameDay Audio service also reported that archived games haven't been accessible since Monday.

The irony is that Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM), the unit that oversees the streaming service, discontinued using Microsoft's Silverlight player because of chronic glitches and disagreements over how the player should function, CNET reported on Monday. In the story, Bob Bowman, CEO of MLBAM declined to go into detail about why he dropped Microsoft but said baseball is engaged in an ongoing dispute with Microsoft "because of the significant problems" the league encountered last year.

"I wonder how long before Adobe gets the boot," Timothy Thorson told CNET. Thorson said he is a longtime MLB.com subscriber and listens to the games from his home in Germany, where he works as a pianist and translator. "Baseball is one of the things I miss most about the U.S. There are others like me who get up in the morning and want to listen to the game and now we can't."

The glitches affected less than 1 percent of the company's 500,000 subscribers and were not caused by Adobe's player, said Matt Gould, MLBAM's spokesman. Gould added that as of Wednesday evening, eight games were in progress and three were completed and there were no complaints. "We didn't bat 1.000 on opening day, but there are 2,200 games remaining in the major league season. We look forward to providing the most engaging high-def experience for our subscribers."

Adobe said in a statement: "We've been in regular contact with MLB.com, and have heard nothing but praise about the Flash platform."

Gould said the malfunctions were relatively minor and were far fewer and less severe than last season, when many subscribers were unable to even log in. That was when MLB.com was using Silverlight. Gould said that delivering true high-definition streaming video is a complex task and baseball is only now working out the kinks because it couldn't fully test the video feeds from major league ballparks until opening day. Teams don't play in their home stadiums during spring training.

"We've had very small window to do end-to-end testing," Gould said.

As I discussed the situation with Gould on the phone, Charlie Wagner, a CNET photographer overheard me. He told me he was prevented from seeing a ninth-inning rally by his favorite team, the Minnesota Twins, Tuesday night when his MLB.com video player broke down.

"The video froze on me in the ninth inning," said Wagner, who has subscribed to the service for three years. "I couldn't see the finish until ESPN came on... I was mad."

Despite the problems, he Wagner said he thinks the picture quality is better.

As for Silverlight, the company declined to comment but on a blog post, Steve Sklepowich, a Microsoft executive, did challenge one of Bowman's assertions about Adobe. Bowman suggested that Adobe was a better fit for baseball because of Flash's wide consumer adoption.

"While Flash 9 may have high penetration," Sklepowich wrote, "the Swarmcast NexDef plug-in that helps power MLB's HD experience has virtually no adoption. Ubiquity here is a red herring. What customers really want are high quality solutions. Silverlight has been doing that since its inception and already supports the ability to deliver true HD using IIS Smooth Streaming with no additional plug-in required."

Perhaps Bowman described the situation best this week when he said that streaming video on the Web isn't as trustworthy yet as television. "You turn on the TV and it just works," he said. "(Internet video) still has a ways to go."

Screenshot from MLB.com's new Flash player.

(Credit: MLB.com)

The thwacking sounds of bats striking balls will once again fill stadiums, as Monday is opening day for Major League Baseball. This year, Microsoft will watch from the sidelines.

MLB.com no longer uses Microsoft's Silverlight to stream games to its 500,000 subscribers. This season fans will watch live and on-demand video via Adobe's Flash player.

In November, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the league's tech unit, announced it would discontinue using Silverlight, the browser plug-in that MLBAM had signed up for barely a year earlier. The decision was not insignificant. MLBAM not only runs the profitable MLB.com streaming-video service, the Web's most successful subscription service, but the group is also influential with other leagues and sporting events. 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 (CBS is the parent company CNET News).

Baseball never detailed the reasons for dropping Silverlight but sources close to the negotiations between the league and Microsoft said it was a series of glitches and conflicts between the companies that led to the split.

First, baseball wanted Microsoft to make it possible for users to download Silverlight without having to possess administrative rights. When people are at work, it's often the company that possesses those rights and employees would need authorization to download the player. That frustrated plenty of MLB.com subscribers, according to the sources.

The other major issue was that baseball considered Silverlight too unstable. There were some high-profile glitches, including last year's opening day, which saw many MLB.com subscribers struggling to log in and others who were unable to watch games. The malfunctions lasted several days. The rift between Microsoft and MLBAM began to grow and hasn't stopped, said the sources, adding that lawyers for each side are still arguing over Microsoft's responsibility.

Through a spokeswoman, Microsoft declined to comment but did point us to plenty of other sporting events for which Silverlight was chosen, including NBC's Webcast of the 2008 Summer Games and CBS's online presentation of the NCAA basketball tournament. NBC also recently announced that it will broadcast the 2010 Vancouver Olympics using Silverlight.

But Silverlight was also suspected by many Netflix users of being the cause for a recent series of glitches that occurred with Netflix's streaming-video service. Microsoft appeared to acknowledge that its player was the cause of at least some problems when it said last month that Silverlight 3 could help Netflix customers who run lower-end computers and were experiencing dropped frames and poor viewing quality. Netflix has said that most of the feedback on Silverlight is positive.

Bob Bowman, MLBAM CEO, also declined to detail what happened with Silverlight. He did, however, acknowledge that MLBAM "has an ongoing dispute with Microsoft because of the significant problems we encountered last year." What Bowman wanted to discuss was Adobe Flash and the successful marriage of baseball and the Internet.

Q: How much better is your video player this year?
Bowman: The experience has been everything that we did not have a year ago...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: How come your on-demand video subscription service appears to be more profitable than the other leagues?
Bowman: The nature of our game, we play every day, we have fans who watch us on Tuesday, talk about us on Wednesday, listen to us on Thursday and maybe go see us on Friday. They touch baseball every day. They just do it in different ways based on how much time they have. Today's society, the interactive-digital society, can stay in touch with baseball better than they've ever done before. That keeps getting better. The iPhone's MLB At-Bat application is one example of that.

It isn't because we're different or smarter. Baseball is just better. It's better suited for this kind of daily, hourly interactive conversation. Then you get the video and people have 15 minutes. You better give them the very best product you have.

Bob Bowman, CEO of baseball's technology unit

(Credit: Major League Baseball Advanced Media)

Q: How much harder and more expensive is it to do high-definition streaming?
Bowman: First of all it's based upon what the park does. Probably only 70 percent of the games are in true high-def. About 30 percent of the games aren't in high def even on your TV. It's roughly doubling in terms of the costs. The infrastructure is more certainly more expensive obviously. But the daily coding and redistributing almost doubles the cost. It isn't arithmetic. As you know the video is even more than doubling, but you get rates and expenses by the time you're done it roughly doubles the cost.

Presumably the costs will come down. They are certainly moving in that direction for the last several years. But for us it was a relatively straight-forward decision to give our fans the very best.

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

Netflix is trying to locate the source of a series of glitches that some users of the company's streaming service are blaming on Microsoft's Silverlight video player.

Over the weekend, a steady stream of angry messages was posted to Netflix's blog. The complaints range from choppy video, to audio that doesn't sync with the picture, to grainy image quality.

The complaints began accumulating soon after the Web's largest video-rental service switched to Microsoft's Silverlight in November. The posts appear to have trickled in until last weekend, when a score of customers began reporting problems.

"The quality of the video looks like bad VHS," wrote someone on the Netflix who identified themselves as Steve-O. "I use an Acer Netbook over my home network and the quality is poor. Also, I cannot even see the button to make the video full screen (using Acer One Netbook with Firefox browser). However, I imagine this will make the quality even worse. What a disaster."

Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said the company, which now has more than 10 million subscribers, has yet to pinpoint the cause of the malfunctions. He added that only a small percentage of customers have complained but that the company continues to look for a fix.

Swasey defended Silverlight. He said the company has received mostly kudos from customers after switching to the software last fall. A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment.

"The new player is far better," Swasey said. "It's faster, more reliable and provides greater stability. The vast majority of Netflix members have had a great experience."

The other major complaint from Netflix customers who posted to the company blog this weekend is that it wasn't made clear there was no way to opt out once they switched to the Silverlight player.

"I certainly feel that Netflix was not forthright in getting me to 'upgrade' to the new viewer (Silverlight)," said someone who posted under the name Jerry. "I don't have a beef with Microsoft. I'll support most technologies that work appropriately--and that is where we have come to a problem. The new viewer simply does not work well enough."

Silverlight has received mixed reviews in the past year. NBC chose Silverlight to stream video of the 2008 Summer Olympics and the company won some favorable reviews. For the games' opening ceremony, Silverlight helped deliver more than 70 million page views in one evening.

But after the conclusion of the games, NBC went back to using Flash. Another setback for Microsoft came when Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the group that streams baseball games over the Web, decided to drop Silverlight.