Less than 8 months after launching their Silverlight powered rich media video player, ITV have dropped Microsoft’s rich streaming platform in favour of the more established, Adobe Flash Player.

According to a recent report from Adobe EMEA Flash Platform Evangelist Andrew Shorten – “whilst having no inside knowledge as to what caused ITV to walk away from Microsoft’s technology it seems though that a combination of technical problems experienced by end-users and the relatively low distribution of the the runtime, which required most visitors to install Silverlight, proved to be too much of a barrier for end-user adoption”

Another report, indicated that the ITV Player was the least attractive of the online TV services offered by the four main British broadcasters (BBC, C4, and Five). Picture quality was reported to be closer to YouTube fuzziness than the quality of BBC’s iPlayer. The browser window for viewing is also on the small size and the full screen option is a non-starter due to a blocky pixelated screen.

ITV initially launched ITV Player as a direct response to BBC’s iPlayer and Sky’s on-demand service. The video-on-demand section of ITV.com, formally know as Catch Up, allows users to view a selection of the best ITV shows for 30 days and has seen a rapid rise in users, with the average number of plays per month increasing by 3354% since it launched. UK cable operator, Virgin Media, said Monday that ITV Player, generated over 4 million on-demand views in the first full month after its launch on Virgin’s VOD platform.

This is the second high profile customer Microsoft have lost to Adobe’s Platform this year. With, Major League Baseball’s MLB.com also dropping Silverlight, earlier in the year, in favour of Flash. With baseball executives saying that Silverlight was too unstable for a profitable subscription service.