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Microsoft's multimedia technology will be the delivery mechanism of choice for videos on the National Basketball Association's website. The Sliverlight plug-in scored a slam dunk with the NBA, which will use it with videos for the league's site, as well as the websites for the WNBA and the D-League.

Video and images along with interactive applications running on Silverlight work across major browsers on both the Windows and Mac OS platforms. The announcement by the league and Microsoft suggests more of the NBA's archived content should emerge online.

"This will be a great application for us to further showcase both historic and current NBA photos and video on NBA.com," said Steve Grimes, vice president of interactive services for NBA Entertainment.

Silverlight will get more of a workout than whoever gets stuck covering LeBron James when he comes back from his finger injury. NBA.com streamed 38 million videos in November 2007.

The April 2007 debut of Silverlight also featured an announced pairing with Major League Baseball. Several other firms, including Akamai and Brightcove, support Microsoft's challenge to Adobe's Media Player and other multimedia-oriented Adobe products.

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