Back in 2008, the NFL were responsible for managing their own (online) platform technology choices, and decided to run with the Adobe Flash Platform for the launch of their inaugural Sunday Night Football Extra interactive video application. Whilst the NFL are still (for the most part) responsible for managing these choices, last week they signed a deal which changes the (online) playing field.

The new two year deal, signed with NBC, extends the network rights to broadcast Sunday night football on TV, and as well as online, through 2011. Despite having agreements in place with ESPN, CBS, and Fox to broadcast games through 2013, these contracts don’t include the online broadcast rights.

Given that Microsoft is the online broadcast partner of choice for NBC it seemed almost a fa de compli that they would chose to run with Silverlight as the preferred video streaming platform for the next version of the NFL’s Sunday Night Extra. Especially given the track record of NBC working with Silverlight for the Beijing 2008 Olympics and Wimbledon.

In an interview last week, NBC Sports senior vice president of digital media Perkins Miller mentioned that they had signed Inlet Encoders and iStreamPlanet to provide video encoding for all of the games, and San Francisco-based Vertigo Software Inc. to develop the interactive Silverlight video player. Logging and QoS will be provided by Conviva and Omniture.

Similar to the Adobe Flash powered player from last year, the Silverlight-based player will include multiple camera angles, picture-in-picture functionality, as well as metadata tagged play markers to allow users to jump to points in the game where major plays have occurred. Some of the features of the new Smooth Streaming powered Silverlight player will include full DVR functionality and super ‘slo-mo’ replay.

The NFL and DIRECTV are still leveraging Adobe’s Flash Platform for the NFL SUNDAY TICKET™ SUPERCAST™ service, which enables subscribers using a wide variety of browsers, desktops, and operating systems to view live video streams of games, as well as the latest statistics and video highlights. In addition to this, the NFL continues to use Adobe Premiere Express for their Replay Re-Cutter application.

Disclaimer – I was directly involved in the development of the Flash version of the NFL Sunday Night Football Extra last year.