Microsoft's Silverlight: Yes, we can
Just as President-elect Barack Obama has been busy assembling his Cabinet, the Presidential Inaugural Committee has been busy selecting providers of tech services for this week's inaugural festivities.
The PIC has already made arrangements with YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr. The latest appointee? Microsoft's Silverlight Media Player, which has been tapped to enable live and on-demand video streaming of Tuesday's ceremony on the PIC Web site.
The PIC will also stream video of a Baltimore event on the Whistle Stop Tour that will take the President-elect and Vice President-elect Joe Biden to Washington, D.C., from Philadelphia.
This is not Silverlight's first major foray into politics. In August of last year, the Democratic National Convention Committee used Silverlight to stream convention proceedings, including President-elect Obama's acceptance speech.
Silverlight's participation in the inauguration could help Microsoft boost the momentum it gained from its work with NBC streaming live coverage for last summer's Olympics in Beijing. Over a 17-day period, Microsoft said NBCOlympics.com had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video watched.
After initial sluggish demand for the browser plug-in, the software maker said the Olympics helped boost Silverlight's U.S. penetration by 30 percent.
Silverlight, a competitor to Flash, debuted in 2007, and the final version of the Silverlight 2 media player came out in October. Among the new features are support for digital rights management technology, improved cross-platform support and deep zoom technology.
Leslie Katz, senior editor of CNET's Crave, covers gadgets, games, and most other digital distractions. As a co-host of the CNET News Daily Podcast, she sometimes tries to channel Terry Gross. E-mail Leslie. 
can you think of any reasons to pick silverlight over flash here? i bet microsoft can come up with a few, meanwhile it's competitors are being locked out.
SIlverlight also enables developers to create rich web applications using standardized languages such as C#. ActionScript is not a standard langauge.
Silverlight also significantly outperforms Flash: http://www.bubblemark.com/
On a personal note, after enduring the Flash NFL experience for less than one quarter this year, and comparing it to Silverlight's use in the Olympics, its pretty clear which is undoubtedly better (Silverlight).
are you going to DRM a presidential inauguration? what a joke! only microsoft would consider such a thing!
Flash, as can be seen by YouTube's new higher-definition content, supports h.264, so the VC-1 argument is weak. The development environment argument is interesting but irrelevant to me as a customer. All I see as a customer is a format that's incompatible with many popular systems and ships with almost no browsers.
Anything that a government official says is public domain so copy protection is pretty much pointless. Unless one networks cameras have some special unqiue angle that is worth paying extra for most people aren't going to even care if somebody reuses their video feed because big events like this generally don't directly make the networks money. Anyone going back for a historical article of the event is just going to take the public domain videos/images and going to bypass paying royalties unless there is a compelling reason to use another source.
Technically speaking I haven't seen much advantage to VC-1 over H.264. The last I check H.264 is an ISO standard and VC-1 is NOT. Since Flash still has better market penetratration and supports H.264
BTW, the benchmarks you refer AFAIKT don't refer to video performance of said environment at all, which is what is in question. I my informal experiments I haven't found a lot of compelling evidence to show Silverlight provides an clear benefit to end users.
Why would one want hit less people unless there was a clear compelling argument?
PS: What kind of lowlife calls themself "shootthecops"??
when microsoft loses a business deal, it is called open market. when they win, it is called bribing. nice. i wonder if you would say the same thing flash was used for broadcasting of this event.
Yeah, I'm sure that's the way it happened.
Regarding the language of "bribes vs. deals," I'll admit to a personal double-standard, but Microsoft has earned it by championing mediocrity for so long. They wouldn't know innovation if it bit them in the Ballmer.
I agree with the need -- Flash is a dinosaur, and Microsoft's own history tells us that if they actually achieved dominant market share with Silverlight, they'd immediately (1) abuse their power and (2) let the Silverlight tech atrophy.
But "same performance across the board" is a pipe dream, whether "cross platform, open source technology" or not. Not a single example exists today -- at least not anything half as complex as a Flash replacement.
Adobe did the same thing.
Maybe they have forces a few people to install it, and 30% is quite nice, but it seems like "the web" does not take on Silverlight as Microsoft would want it to.
As an example, if their penetration before the Olympics was 15%, their penetration after the Olympics would be approx. 20%.
After he's kicked out of the governors's office in a couple of days Rod Blagojevich is going to work for Ballmer in the pay-to-play division of Microsoft. Then we'll see Silverlight's market share really take off. Mark my words.
http://newteevee.com/2009/01/14/where-to-watch-obamas-inauguration-online/
I've developed using Flash and Silverlight. Silverlight is pleasant and enjoyable, Flash is not.
"Don't kid yourself - the reasoning behind Silverlight has nothing to do with Microsoft striving to make the Web a better place. It's all about gaining more control of a medium they never had much to say with (apart from the dominance of the IE, which is now being chewed at by Mozilla/Firefox)"
Need I mention what Microsoft did with their IE dominance? Stagnation. There's no reason to believe they wouldn't do the same with Silverlight, because they (Ballmer especially) have repeatedly demonstrated their only commitment is to short-term profits. But you're more than welcome to drink the pleasant and enjoyable Kool-Aid.
As a .NET developer since the beginning (late '01 for beta), I was thrilled when Silverlight 2 finally shipped because it finally gave people with my skillset a rich platform to work with inside the browser. It really grew in the opposite manner from Flash. While Flash was originally designed as an animation tool with programmability added later, Silverlight was built from the start as something UI driven that happens to do animation. For that reason, I sometimes have a hard time comparing it to Flash.
My point is that it's silly to argue it was created for world domination. It was the next logical extension for the .NET Framework.
Alejo
Thanks MS- now all of the swooners out there will have even more crapware bogging down there browsers from that day onward.
It's a rather appropriate parallel to start off the term of the next POTUS- what looked oh-so-good for many at the beginning will bite them in the ass down the line, calling for "fixes" that exacerbate the problem.
Just lovely.
Silverlight: Full version available for Windows. Partly-crippled version available for OS X. Non-functional version available for Linux. No 64-bit support.
The mono developers are complicit in trying to help bring down Linux.
Not too many linux users and developers like mono.
Silverlight is impressive. C# is the most modern programming language available. I guess people have a problem with more choice. I've read interviews with the Adobe management and they know they've got a problem with Silverlight. Long run it's tough to see how they're going to compete because if they try to go feature-for-feature against Silverlight they run up against .NET. They've got zero hope of competing in that arena.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Microsoft-Windows-7/39012423321
I've downloaded the Silverlight plugin, and I have no problem keeping it installed. If it were error-prone or insecure, I'd remove it immediately. But frankly, it works fine, and if it provides me a more robust experience on the web, and more companies or organizations use it, I'll keep using it as well.
It's just a company, people. If you hate it so much, make a better product -- not similar, not more free, but better -- and market the hell out of it.
The problem is when Microsoft restricts its technology to Windows.
It hasn't done that, yet (Silverlight is available for Mac OS X and a version, called Moonlight, is being developed and improved for Linux by Novell, with Microsoft approval (using the Mono platform for .NET compatibility)).
So far, Microsoft is playing fair on this one. But Microsoft has been a sneaky, anti-competitive company in the past, so this effort bears watching.
It doesn't actually work either.
So? Why should they support other platforms? So that a very small minority can be happy? Most software is only for Windows, so get used to it because it's not going to change anytime soon.
So? Why should they support other platforms? So that a very small minority can be happy? Most software is only for Windows, so get used to it because it's not going to change anytime soon.
Even Google releases all of it's software first for the number one operating system: Windows. Get over yourself.
So much for being all-inclusive.
Just wait, in a few months we will find out that MS set all this up for them for free in exchange for the new administration keeping the policies in place that allows MS to do whatever they want.
Oh btw, could you just cry some more for me? Waaaaaaah.
- by Squashman2 January 19, 2009 10:58 AM PST
- I recently got a Netflix account I am certainly not to impressed with SilverLight application used to Stream movies.
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- by wizlb January 19, 2009 11:49 AM PST
- Great story. Is it true?
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