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For better or worse, Silverlight is still the best way to play back video in the browser. The performance of the Flash video player is simply appalling and HTML

For better or worse, Silverlight is still the best way to play back video in the browser. The performance of the Flash video player is simply appalling and HTML5 video playback has its own problems as well (codec issues, buggy implementations although that improved a lot recently.) If you want nice, smooth playback in any browser, on Windows or OS X, you need to use Silverlight. It's not a coincidence that Netflix uses it. I have to agree though that it doesn't really make sense to use Silverlight for anything else, although Bing Maps is pretty impressive.

sukuriant 15y ago
Don't forget DRM, too (a la Netflix) I don't support restrictive DRM, but Netflix does have to bow to their content owners to stay in business
sciurus 15y ago
What percentage of users have silverlight installed?
- kenjackson 15y ago
  Depends on how you segment. For mobile its just a 1-2% tops (WP7 users). On the desktop I've heard something like 50-60%. Lets put it this way, there are 500M or so Silverlight enabled desktops. There aren't many things you can target that have such a large user base.