MLB.com and Adobe announce a two-year agreement in which MLB.com has selected the Adobe Flash Platform to deliver all of its live and on-demand video offerings beginning in 2009. In addition, MLB.com will provide a downloadable rich Internet application built using Adobe AIR, so baseball fans can access additional features outside the Web browser.

MLB.com streams live every Major League spring training, regular season and postseason game, more than 2,500 annually, via its out-of-market subscription product, which has seen more than 1.5 million total subscribers since its debut on Opening Day 2003. Since that time, fans have accessed more than 1.8 billion streams of live and on-demand multimedia offerings on MLB.com, representing nearly 200 million hours of participation. By the end of 2008, MLB.com will once again stream nearly 12,000 live video events, including Major League Baseball games and thousands of events for its various business partners.

MLB.com Adopts the Industry’s Most Popular Technology for Web Video

Adobe Flash Player — already installed on more than 98 percent of Internet-connected desktops — will enable fans to view the games, helping MLB.com reach the largest possible Internet audience on virtually all major platforms and browsers. Adobe Flash Media Server software will be the video streaming engine behind the games, enabling fans to view high-quality live video on the Web. According to comScore Media Metrix, 81 percent of online videos viewed worldwide are delivered using Adobe Flash technology, making it the No. 1 format for video on the Web.

Throughout the 2008 season, MLB.com continued to develop and integrate new features into its live streaming product. Among those offerings were: selecting the home or away feed for every game; presenting NexDef, a standard definition television quality picture at 1.2 megabits per second in a 16x9 widescreen format; and enhancing the Emmy Award-winning Mosaic application.