Streaming Learning Center

Microsoft Silverlight has been very noticably used by NBC (Olympics/Sunday Night Football), but never achieved the penetration necessary for smaller businesses to adopt it. The thing is, while the sizzle behind Silverlight has always been video (as with Flash), the steak has always been Rich Internet Applications, and more specifically, the tools that developers use to build them. In my view, that's the primary reason that Silverlight exists.

Now, Microsoft is de-emphasizing Silverlight in favor of HTML5. This will have very little impact in the streaming video marketplace, but you don't need C#, .NET or Visual Basic to build HTML5 apps. So where does that leave developers?

With adaptive bitrate streaming, companies can post multiple streams of a video and let the technology sort out the rest. Contenders include Move Networks (Adaptive Streaming), Microsoft (Smooth Streaming) and Adobe (Dynamic Streaming). So which product is best for you?

Microsoft Silverlight has gained lots of recent attention as a platform for live event streaming applications, and soon may have sufficient penetration for other web sites to consider using. This article tells you what you need to know about Silverlight with a number of useful links to more in-depth resources.  

All’s been quiet on the Streaming Learning Center front as I spent the last week teaching several courses on streaming media production and encoding at the lovely Stanford Campus at Palo Alto. Other than a quick sneak peak at the new Final Cut Studio, which you can read about here, it was pretty much full immersion into the streaming world from a user’s perspective. This led to several conclusions about the future of streaming video and Microsoft Silverlight that I thought I would share.

One of the more intriguing rumors to come out of Streaming Media East was that Microsoft was going to add H.264 playback to Silverlight and/or the Windows Media Player. The idea made so much sense that it was instantly believable, but Microsoft has denied the rumor’s veracity, repeatedly saying “I have not had sex with that woman” in a vaguely southern accent. Or at least that’s what I keep hearing. In this column, I’ll lay out the reasons that Microsoft should consider adding H.264 support in Silverlight and Media Player and dropping continued development of VC-1.

Since its introduction at NAB Show 2007, Microsoft Silverlight has achieved a number of high-profile design wins — including mlb.com, nba.com, and NBC's streaming technology for the broadcast of the upcoming Olympics. Although Adobe Flash is still far and away the mindshare leader, Silverlight has established itself as an alternative that many web professionals must at least consider when choosing a technology for web design or web video. In this article, I'll outline the various roles that each technology performs and discuss factors to consider when evaluating the two technologies.