{"id":74,"date":"2008-09-10T12:04:57","date_gmt":"2008-09-10T16:04:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/?p=74"},"modified":"2008-09-10T12:04:57","modified_gmt":"2008-09-10T16:04:57","slug":"microsoft-silverlight-to-begin-supporting-flash-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/10\/microsoft-silverlight-to-begin-supporting-flash-video\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Silverlight To Begin Supporting Flash Video"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About a month ago I did a post&#8230;or more accurately a review&#8230;of <strong>Microsoft Silverlight<\/strong> (Microsoft&#8217;s foray into the world of web video).\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/technical_stuff\/2008\/08\/07\/is-microsoft-silverlight-a-viable-alternative-to-flash\/\" target=\"_blank\">The review even drew a couple comments from the Silverlight team at Microsoft<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>At the time, my big question with Silverlight was&#8230;why would someone want to use it when Flash is the Internet standard when it comes to web video?<\/p>\n<p>Well, Microsoft just announced that the new Silverlight player (due for release in early 2009) will support Flash video files.\u00a0 That&#8217;s right, they&#8217;re going to start supporting the very video format they&#8217;re trying to compete with.<\/p>\n<p>Kind of.<\/p>\n<p>You see, the Silverlight player is going to support Flash files only in the h.264 format.\u00a0 And&#8230;it won&#8217;t support streaming Flash files (like from a streaming Flash server)&#8230;only progressive downloads (which is how the majority of videos on the web are viewed).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Why is Microsoft doing this?<\/strong> According to Steven Sklepowich, Group Product Manager for Silverlight, it&#8217;s because h.264 is becoming &#8220;the next generation standard&#8221; in web video and &#8220;we&#8217;re becoming more of an open runtime environment&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Or it could be that 70% of the videos viewed online last year were in the Flash format and Microsoft realized they&#8217;re going to have a tough time getting video content producers to switch sides.\u00a0 So by allowing video content producers to &#8220;stick with what they know&#8221;&#8230;.and giving them the option to use the Silverlight player too&#8230;they are opening doors that would have otherwise remained closed.<\/p>\n<p>Not a bad move considering what they&#8217;re facing.\u00a0 But will it work?\u00a0 Will it eventually convert more people from Flash over to Silverlight?<\/p>\n<p>Maybe a few&#8230;but probably not the numbers they are hoping for.\u00a0 And that&#8217;s because professional video content producers know one thing; if a viewer has to download a plugin to watch online video, they usually end up just clicking away to another page (and that&#8217;s the <strong>last thing<\/strong> we want to have happen).<\/p>\n<p>Flash videos can be watched by 98% of people on the Internet without any plugin downloads.\u00a0 With Silverlight, the numbers swing dramatically the other way.\u00a0 And until Microsoft can come up with some <strong>really compelling reasons<\/strong> for us to use Silverlight over Flash, I think, the majority of us will remain human, resist change&#8230;and just stick with what we know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About a month ago I did a post&#8230;or more accurately a review&#8230;of Microsoft Silverlight (Microsoft&#8217;s foray into the world of web video).\u00a0 The review even drew a couple comments from the Silverlight team at Microsoft. At the time, my big question with Silverlight was&#8230;why would someone want to use it when Flash is the Internet [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[8],"tags":[10,38,33,34],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}