It's All in the Delivery: A Look at the Top Video Players of Today and Tomorrow
"This is a platform that is richly programmable; it has stunning graphics/UI capabilities and interactivity that rivals that of true desktop applications," says Andrew Brust, lead author of Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and chief of new technology for consulting firm twentysix New York. "The fact that version 2.0 is based on .NET means Silverlight will work extremely well in corporate environments as well as consumer scenarios and that the available programming talent is quite abundant."
With new features, such as bitrate throttling that can help content providers better manage cost (content providers pay for what users actually receive, not what a server can deliver), and security features, via Silverlight’s new web playlists that force users to play advertising related to content they want to watch, Silverlight has a lot to offer content distributors. "Think of bitrate throttling as a way to save money and think of web playlists as a way to make money," says Steve Sklepowich, group product manager in the developer division at Microsoft Corp.
Silverlight 2.0 has a tight integration with Visual Studios and other new creative tools that simplify the creation of rich interactive user experiences. Microsoft has a disjointed media strategy that seems to be coming together under the Silverlight brand.
Another key piece of technology in Microsoft’s media toolkit is its XAML (pronounced "zamell") language. "Think of XAML as a declarative language that lets you go seamlessly between the design world and the programming world," says Sklepowich. You take the strength of the developer and you now say to the designer, ‘Go learn these interactive tools, and what you do is going to be 100% maintained as you hand it over to the developer.’"
Still Sklepowich admits Microsoft has challenges ahead. Adobe has long been the leader among creative professionals, and Sklepowich says that Microsoft has to build relationships with that community. "Adobe also has the deployment, just the reach of the Flash player. We have to get there, and we will do that through great content. We are tracking at a million-and-a-half downloads a day and we will get the deployment problem solved in the next few months," Sklepowich says, adding that Microsoft recently signed deals with AOL and Nokia that should extend Silverlight’s reach. "The design community, I think, is a long-term problem. I think the runtime acceptability and the reach is a short-term problem. We will be there. We will be on hundreds of millions of desktops shortly."
A big weakness for Microsoft is its decision not to support H.264, instead choosing to support only VC-1 for high-definition content. If Microsoft continues to rely on VC-1 while the rest of the world moves to support H.264, then it will become vulnerable to losing additional market share to Adobe and others, which it can’t afford to do at this junction.
What makes technology work is the ecosystem that adopts and supports it. Microsoft has benefited when it could control the ecosystem, but in a post-DOJ era in which it can’t do that, Microsoft may have to learn to adopt and promote common technology that the digital media ecosystem standardizes around.
If you are a Microsoft developer/enterprise or content owner who has invested in Windows Media technologies, stay put and enjoy the ride. Things are only going to get better. But move on if you are looking to support H.264, need Linux support, or want to build solutions based on these open and robust technologies because Microsoft currently doesn’t support Linux. There is an open source project underway being led by Novell, but it supports only VC-1 for now.
Adobe AIR and Adobe Media Player
Adobe’s technology is powering Google’s YouTube and many of FOX Interactive’s websites, including the site for the popular TV show American Idol. These two sites represent more than 54% of streams from the top 10 video brands online, according to Nielsen Online. As a result, Adobe is the current leader in online video playback technologies. The company attained this post by taking advantage of Microsoft’s lack of focus in the internet streaming space. It is now leveraging its leadership to advance its technology so that it plays a bigger role in how video reaches consumers: via the internet, portable devices, and connected TV sets in their homes.
Like Microsoft, Adobe has lacked the robust developer tools needed to create desktop applications, but the company addressed this recently by launching Adobe AIR, a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich media applications that run on the internet and/or on desktops. "The benefits seem to be that if you are used to creating Flash applications, you can now more easily create them with AIR [and its libraries]. And if you are a Flash designer, you can use your current design tool [such as Dreamweaver] to now create desktop applications. … Whether you’re an HTML/AJAX or Flash/Flex developer, you can now seamlessly bring your web applications to the desktop on PC, Mac, and Linux using your existing skills and whatever development environment you are most comfortable with," says Peter Elst, a freelance Flash platform consultant, Adobe community expert, and author of Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0.