Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Silverlight comes to MLB

analysis
Aug 7, 20072 mins

Why would I, a known Red Sox fan, be interested in the screen shot at left grabbed from a video of Yankee A-Rod's 500'th homer? Because it's the first instance, or at least the first I know about, of a major league (not to mention Major League) site using Silverlight. The press release that told me about this follows: Microsoft is happy to share that MLB.com, the official website of Major League

The press release that told me about this follows:

Microsoft is happy to share that MLB.com, the official website of Major League Baseball, has deployed a new online media player using Microsoft Silverlight 1.0.  MLB.com first announced support for Silverlight at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Conference earlier this year and previewed the new player during the keynote at the Microsoft MIX’07 conference.

MLB.com has been looking for a way to bring a more interactive and enticing media experience to baseball fans around the world. With Silverlight, MLB.com will reach an even broader audience while pursuing new media experiences for its viewers. The new player provides fans with a richer, more interactive experience on MLB.com by engaging users to share baseball video with the capability to email directly from the media player. To take a look at the new player, please go here and to see how the new video player will be integrated into existing MLB.com content, please go here.

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in for delivering media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. Silverlight helps media companies deliver interactive web experiences with higher quality, broader reach, and greater control while reducing delivery costs.  In addition, Silverlight is compatible with the millions of hours of existing Windows Media content.  A feature complete release candidate (RC) of Silverlight was released on July 27th.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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