Microsoft Silverlight scores with MLB

Barry Bonds—whether you like him or not—wasn’t the only one making a mark with Major League Baseball this week.

Microsoft rolled out its first high-profile deployment of a Web site based on its Silverlight rich media platform this week at MLB.com. Word of the deployment hit first on an internal Microsoft developer blog (see brief InfoWorld and ZDNet stories, too).

Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Systems’ Flash, providing a development tool and browser plug-in to enable Web sites to add interactive and video content to their Web sites. The vendor unveiled Silverlight to much fanfare back in April. MLB.com was announced as a content provider during that launch.

For Microsoft, the stakes are high. Silverlight represents a major bet by the vendor to gain ground in the race to provide rich media to Web sites and network-connected devices.

MLB.com is using the technology as part of a video application that provides video game highlights alongside other related information (see screen shot) or visit here to see SilverLight in action (plug-in download required).