Earlier this month the Major League Baseball organization suffered a few bouts of down time for its web streams, so it's not entirely surprising that MLB is broadening its distribution strategy for its online viewing capabilities. MLB.tv has chosen Swarmcast's Autobahn platform to power all 2008 regular season games live on the Internet.
Autobahn is a fairly trusted platform for video delivery, and Swarmcast has spent the past year improving the Autobahn's features. So how does it work? Swarmcast combines multiple CDNs together so that Autobahn can bypass some of the inherent limitations on traditional streaming. This delivers the highest available bandwidth to individual users, based on their connection.
There are still a number of delivery options available to users that would like access to various features and premium services for MLB.tv, including mobile options and the standalone Mosaic player, which was the platform that experienced outage problems just a few weeks back.
But as Swarmcast makes in moves with Microsoft due to its use of Silverlight and other efforts towards quality HD program delivery, Swarmcast will hopefully be able to absolve many of the problems that MLB.tv has had in recent months.