News Blog

Ever since NBC announced their very ambitious plans for online coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, I have been very excited to see how well they execute it. Promising 3,500 hours of online video, with 2,200 hours of live streams, full event replays, and highlights, for free, how could they go wrong? It has recently come to light that the online coverage may not be as complete as we were hoping.

NBC will not be offering live online feeds of any events that will be broadcast on TV. The ones broadcast on TV will, of course, include the most popular events and the ones that people are most likely to tune into. The video of the events will be on NBC's site only after the events have been completed. With this in mind, it is clear that NBC views its online offering as a supplement to their TV broadcast and not as any sort of a replacement.

Many have been really quick to heavily criticize this move by NBC, but I'm not jumping on that bandwagon just yet. I am usually not one to defend old media (see my post on Why Broadcast TV Sucks), but I have some sympathy for NBC here. I applaud NBC for taking this major leap into the online distribution of this major event in the first place. It's an unfamiliar road and a departure from a model that has worked for NBC for a very long time.

Of course, we would love to see every live stream available to us, with videos and highlights that we could embed on other sites, but this may be too radical of a first step for NBC. Think of this year's Olympic webcast as testing the waters. If NBC's web offerings prove to be profitable this year, then maybe they will expand their offerings in years to come. The Olympics only happen every two years (the more popular Summer version every four) and I can understand NBC not wanting to gamble too much on this very costly venture.

An online feed of an event like the Olympics (or any sporting event for that matter) can offer all sorts of rich functionality, including realtime statistics, scores, and leaderboards. There is no doubt in my mind that rich functionality will eventually win out, whether it is viewed on your computer or through a new interface on your TV. If it doesn't look like they get it now, NBC and the other networks will eventually see the light, but these big companies may just need a little more time to make the switch at their own pace.

Amidst all of this, let's not forget who the potential big winner is with this year's Olympics. No, it's not all of the athletes competing for Olympic glory, it's Microsoft's Silverlight. Microsoft scored the exclusive deal with NBC for Silverlight to power all of their Olympic web offerings. Not having caught on that well yet, this will prove to be a good way to expose a lot of new people to Silverlight and get their plug-in installed on a lot more computers. While it may not be the gamebreaker, it will certainly give them a shot in the arm in their fight against Flash.

Don't believe the haters, NBC's online offering of the Olympics is a step in the right direction, just not two steps as a lot had hoped.

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

Microsoft is launching a revamped test version of its Silverlight software that is designed to broaden the appeal of the company's answer to Adobe Systems' Flash.

Chairman Bill Gates was set to announce Silverlight 2 beta 2 on Tuesday morning at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Orlando, Fla. Gates was also slated to unveil a partnership with IBM to make it easier to build DB2 database applications using Microsoft's tools, as well as updates to other Microsoft tools.

The new release of Silverlight, which will be available for download on Tuesday, includes support for Microsoft's .Net Framework, the company's programming model for building Windows applications, which will likely make it more appealing to established Windows programmers, said Jonathan Perera, general manager of Microsoft's Application Platform Division.

"If Silverlight 1.0 was about what people could do on their Web sites, Silverlight 2.0 is about what people can do on their interactive applications," Perera said.

The initial release of Silverlight, a browser plug-in for rich interactive applications such as audio-video playback and animation, has yet to diminish the popularity of Flash, though the revamped release could fare better thanks to the .Net support. Microsoft estimates that there are about 4 million .Net developers worldwide.

Microsoft also debuted a technology preview of software code named Velocity that makes it easier to build Web applications that include an in-memory data cache, such as Web commerce applications. For programmers, Velocity can ease the burden of application memory management and other complex tasks, said Perera.

Mozilla Europe's founder, Tristan Nitot, has no problem with free software. Indeed, his organization has created some of the best of it. But when software technologies like Adobe Systems' Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight are free but proprietary, they can create all sorts of problems. "Free" without "open" can become a one-way ticket to technology prison.

Adobe has recently taken steps to open up its Flash technology, but Nitot's concern is still valid:

He described the nature of the Web at the moment as open but suggested that "proprietary solutions running on top of the Web are trying to take over"..."So far, there has not been a problem," Nitot said. "Both Adobe and Microsoft have been willing to give (Flash and Silverlight away) for free. But maybe they have an agenda. They're not here for the glory; they're here for the money."

Nitot gave two historical examples of Microsoft and Adobe withdrawing or withholding products from certain platforms: Microsoft's discontinuation of Internet Explorer for Unix and Mac, and Adobe's long-standing refusal to "provide a recent version of Flash for Linux users." He suggested that Web developers should be asking those companies whether they are "sure that Silverlight and Flash will always be available on all platforms (and) run decently on all platforms."

... Read more

Miguel de Icaza, who heads up the open-source Mono project, has provided an update on a project to create Silverlight applications that run out of the browser, moving a small step toward what Adobe Systems offers with AIR.

Mono is an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net framework. It lets developers use Microsoft tools and languages, like C#, to write applications that run on Windows, Linux, or MacOS.

Part of the Mono project is Moonlight, an implementation of Silverlight that runs on Linux. Silverlight is a browser plug-in for rich Internet applications.

De Icaza said that some of the Moonlight work aims to let people write Silverlight applications that run standalone, outside the browser.

That's not something Microsoft offers right now. Many people expect the company to do that to compete with Adobe's AIR, which lets people use Web tools to write desktop applications.

The "Moonlight desklets" from Mono run standalone outside the browser, too. But de Icaza made it clear that there's quite a bit of work to make it easier to write them for all Mono-supported operating systems.

"We as a team can certainly create a Linux-only platform for these controls, and live happily with Mopen, but we would miss an opportunity of having something cross platform like AIR is.

"Ideally, Microsoft would follow our direction and implement and distribute the same Mopen functionality (the mechanism for creating stand-alone Moonlight desklets) that we have for Windows and Mac. This would ensure maximum adoption of standalone Silverlight-applications," de Icaza wrote in his blog.

He said once Microsoft releases Silverlight 2.0 later this year, the task of writing standalone Silverlight applications will get easier. He also said that it would be a feature in Moonlight 2.0 while they are still working on the 1.0 version.

Microsoft chose the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show 2008 in Las Vegas to announce new customers for its Silverlight rich-media player and introduce software aimed at broadcasters.

It also detailed SilverlightDRM, a content protection system based on Microsoft's PlayReady technology, which is set to be available later this year with Silverlight 2.

The digital rights management, or DRM, software will work with streamed, progressive download, and downloadable media, and it can be extended by third-party software companies, Microsoft said.

Microsoft is trying to make Silverlight the preferred medium to broadcast video on the Web--a challenge, given the resounding lead that Adobe Systems has with Flash.

Microsoft said 1.5 million people a day are downloading Silverlight. Adobe claims that more than 90 percent of Web users are already using the current version of the Flash Player.

New Silverlight customers include Madison Square Garden (MSG) Interactive, Chinese Web portal Tencent, Abertis Telecom, and Terra Networks Operations. Other notable recent customers include NBCOlympics.com and Yahoo Japan.

While they woo content producers, both companies are also battling over software developers. The millions of programmers trained in Microsoft's .Net tools can write rich Internet applications with Silverlight. Adobe, too, is boosting up its tools investment around Web toolkits and Flex.

Also at NAB, Microsoft announced enhancements to products aimed at broadcasters.

Microsoft and Ascent Media Group have formed a partnership to automate the supply chain for the entertainment industry. It also said Microsoft executives will show off versions of its Dynamics packaged applications customized for the media customers at NAB.

Microsoft also added features to its Interactive Media Manager application, which is built on SharePoint Server, including a Silverlight rough-cut video editor and an enhanced searchable media catalog.

It's probably not a wholly accurate description, but to call Mix '08 the conference for "the new Microsoft" doesn't seem that far off. Perhaps even more apt would be to think of it as the show for Microsoft as it aspires to be. Other possibilities? Well, if one were cynical, maybe "the conference for Microsoft as it wishes others to see it." Or if one were sympathetic to the travails of companies with large, and fundamentally conservative, installed bases how about this for a tag line: "If only change were easy as giving a slick conference."

Yet, for all that, having attended numerous Microsoft events over the years, the gestalt of this one was palpably different. One would never mistake Mix '08, held in Las Vegas earlier this month, for a Tech-Ed, much less a WinHEC. It's not just a case of different session tracks or appropriate obeisance to the rise of network-based computing in a Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie keynote, though those were certainly present. Rather it was an infusion of different attitudes and behaviors--and software releases that offered evidence of at least nascent change.

Silverlight, Microsoft's Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework, makes a good study point. Silverlight is most notably a competitor to the Adobe Integrated Runtime (aka AIR, nee Apollo). It's essentially an approach to using the horsepower of a "thick client" PC to allow applications being delivered over the network be as responsive and immersive as they would be with a typical client app.

I bring up Silverlight for a couple of reasons. The first is that Mix '08 saw the release of Silverlight 2 beta 1, which is really the first full release of Silverlight. (Ray Ozzie referred to it as "delivering on Silverlight's potential.") Whereas Silverlight 1 was narrowly focused on media, Silverlight 2 is a subset of the full desktop Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) UI framework, and also adds networking and local storage options.

In any case, Silverlight was clearly one of the stars of the conference. (There's a lot of information and some very cool demos in the conference sessions--videos of which are all posted online.) I took the opportunity to sit down with Brad Becker, Microsoft's Group Product Manager for the UX (User Experience) & Tools Marketing Group to discuss a it in a bit more depth. We talked about how HTML and JavaScript are being forced to fill roles they were never intended to fill at the same time that user richness and usability expectations are growing. About how Flash was originally "designed to bring Mickey Mouse to the Web"--not interactive, high-resolution media. About the blurring lines between design and development (another interesting thread but out-of-scope here).

And then Brad pulled out a MacBook (running OS X). "Cross platform is a reflection of reality," he explained. A calculated stunt? Hardly. I won't say that Mac's were commonplace among the Microsoft employees at the event. But they were hardly rare (although a few of the big Apple logos that dominate a MacBook's lid were papered over with Silverlight stickers.)

I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that you wouldn't have seen Microsoft employees, including execs, casually carrying around Macs at a conference a few years back. Winds of change are welling up. However faintly.

Does this mean that Microsoft is agnostic about whether developers develop to Windows and .NET? Of course not. But it's worth noting this week I'm in Salt Lake City at Novell's Brainshare user conference. (Yes, it has been a busy month.) Novell execs such as CTO Jeff Jaffe make no bones about their preference for a J2EE on Linux software stack. Yet, Novell remains a major force behind the Mono Project that allows .NET applications to run on Linux and other non-Windows operating environments. And Novell is doing the Linux port of Silverlight ("Moonlight").

In other words, in this day and age, expressing interest--even a strong one--for a given development stack increasingly doesn't translate into prohibiting any sort of interoperability or compatibility with the "enemy." The on-the-ground reality is naturally much messier than executive-level shows of mutual love and respect, but it's still a qualitatively different reality from the old days when walled gardens had high walls indeed.

Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in will be bringing videos and other rich media to Nokia smartphones later this year.

The two companies on Tuesday at Microsoft's Mix '08 conference are scheduled to announce that Microsoft will write a version of Silverlight for Nokia's Series 60 (S60) smartphone software that runs on Symbian OS. The software, which will be available later this year, will also run on Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.

For people with compatible devices, it means they will be able to see content, notably video, written for Silverlight, which Microsoft is pushing as an alternative to Adobe's Flash Player. Microsoft has been signing on content partners to use Silverlight for media streaming, including MLB.com and online Olympic games broadcasting with NBC.

For Microsoft, the deal with Nokia is a step in its pledge to make Silverlight "ubiquitous," that is, capable of running on multiple operating systems.

The software giant is trying to lure Web developers toward Silverlight--and away from Flash--to build rich Internet applications or media-oriented Web sites.

The strategy, which Microsoft detailed at last year's Mix conference, hinges on creating tools that let traditional Microsoft developers write Silverlight Web applications with familiar products like Visual Studio and ASP.Net.

Silverlight now runs on Windows and Mac OS, and it has a deal with Novell to build a distribution on Linux.

A version of Silverlight for Windows Mobile will be available later this year, said John Case, a general manager in Microsoft's developer division. "The whole Silverlight strategy is to provide one programming model and ubiquity," he said.

Microsoft chose to work with Nokia because it has the largest market share of mobile phones, but it will sign on with other handset makers to create ports of Silverlight, Case said.

All the main features of Silverlight, including video and interactive Web application development, will be included in all mobile versions.

But there will be some device-specific restraints, which means Microsoft will create editions of Silverlight for different mobile platforms, he said.

There are a number of software projects that enable Web applications to run offline, including Adobe's AIR, Google Gears, and the Mozilla Foundation's Prism. What about Microsoft and its Silverlight browser plug-in?

Microsoft does not currently have specific plans to bring offline capabilities to Silverlight, but it's something it will eventually do, said John Case, general manager in Microsoft's developer division.

"It's something that we will want to do," Case said in an interview on Monday. "Eventually, customers will expect us to do it."

Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-platform plug-in for running media-rich applications in different browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Apple's Safari.

Microsoft executives are expected to detail more enhancements to Silverlight at its Mix '08 conference in Las Vegas, which starts on Tuesday.

The company developed Silverlight as an alternative to Adobe's Flash Player, which is widely used for Web video and rich Internet application development.

Microsoft is trying to create a common development environment for Windows, Web applications, and its online Web services.

Until now, however, Microsoft executives have been quiet on the idea of bringing offline access to Silverlight, saying that its bigger priority is porting Silverlight to other platforms, including Linux and mobile devices.

Adobe last week released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) 1.0, a download and development platform for making Web applications behave more like desktop programs, including offline access. Google Gears, still in development, allows Web applications to store local data.

Adobe on Monday released the long-awaited AIR download for running Web applications offline, but Microsoft is readying an update to its Silverlight platform that it hopes will keep Web developers in its camp.

Microsoft will release the first beta of Silverlight 2 "shortly," said Scott Guthrie, a general manager in Microsoft's developer division in charge of Web development, in his blog on Friday. Next week, the company is hosting its Mix '08 Web development and design conference in Las Vegas.

Silverlight 2 is a significant upgrade to the existing edition because it's designed to let programmers write rich Internet applications for Windows and Macintosh browsers using Microsoft's popular .Net tools.

The area of rich Internet applications is fast becoming one of the most hotly contested among infrastructure software providers.

There a handful of emerging platforms that look to bring the features associated with desktop applications, such as offline access to data, to the Web.

In addition to Adobe AIR, there is Google Gears for offline access as well as JavaFX and the Mozilla Foundation's Prism project.

Guthrie said that Silverlight 2 has a stripped-down version of the .Net Framework that lets people use many different languages to write for the Web. These applications can run in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Apple's Safari browser.

"Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). We will ship Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tool support that enables great developer/designer work flow and integration when building Silverlight applications," he wrote.

Microsoft hopes to exploit its strengths and developer tools as it battles Adobe and others for developer attention. Developers can use standard Ajax toolkits or Adobe's Flex, which is now open source, to write AIR applications.

Silverlight is now available on Windows or Mac browser but Microsoft said that it intends to have versions for Linux desktops and mobile devices.