5 ms·

Why baseball benched Microsoft Silverlight

17 points by Flemlord 18y ago

trezor 18y ago
Q: What did you see in Flash that impressed you? Bowman: You see several things. You see a high-grade product that's in some form on 99 percent of the browsers. You've got something that's got mass usage. Secondly you see with Adobe a company committed to the customer experience in video with the Flash Player. We see a partner that continues to invest in their product. They have the same desire that we do. They want the Flash Player to be the best thing anybody has ever seen and we want that. When you partner with people like that, it's not a philosophical discussion. We know where we want to be now how do we get there. So once we filter out all the market-speak it pretty much boils down to that Flash has a better market-penetration.
- seekely 18y ago
  Maybe. But as a paying MLB.tv customer, the Silverlight implementation was TERRIBLE. Despite having all year to make improvements, the thing never worked even remotely correctly. I scolded myself as I signed up this year, but there really aren't any other options. To my surprise, I started up the first game today (go Tribe), and couldn't believe how much the player improved. Judging by how many more (functioning) features and polish are in the Flash player than were in the Silverlight player, I suspect it wasn't just market penetration.
  - msie 18y ago
    Adobe has more at stake in seeing Flash succeed than MS does in seeing Silverlight succeed. This may be reflected by the amount of Adobe support and development committed to the Flash platform. I'm sure the Silverlight team is way smaller.
    - dantheman 18y ago
      True, but unfortunately adobe is stuck using AS3 on their VM; silverlight gets to leverage all the .net work. Hopefully they'll add threads to flash sometime in the future, that is the most limiting factor facing it today.
      - TJensen 18y ago
        I cringe to think what the developers at my work would do with threads in the Flash VM. I'd just as soon keep a single-threaded model.
        dantheman 18y ago
        The single thread model has some serious limitations. For instance maybe you would like to load some images & then popup a component containing them. In a threaded world, you can have synchronous communication where it just waits till the download is complete before loading what depends on it. Right now you have to register callbacks, sure that's not too tough, but chaining like that makes it more difficult than it should be. download -> componentA > componentB > ComponentC whereas it might be easier to just go: CompnentA(file.download()); instead of file.Download (CompACallback, FaultCallback);
    - neovive 18y ago
      This is a major point in favor of Flash. The adoption and expansion of Flash into the enterprise is critical to the future of Adobe. Thus, Adobe will continue to invest heavily on improving and expanding the Flash player, API, support and development tools. Microsoft could drop Silverlight with little impact on the company -- it's not critical to the success of Windows at this point.
TweedHeads 18y ago
A nail in silverlight's coffin.
- dannyr 18y ago
  Doubt it. My video experiences with the last Olympics and CBS NCAA coverage were pretty good. If the next Olympics and next year's NCAA drops Silverlight in favor of Flash, then you could say that it probably won't take off. Flash has 5+ years headstart than Silverlight. Flash has also seen its share of technical issues and limitations. With regards to penetration rate, most PCs come with Silverlight pre-installed so this won't be much of an issue in the future.
ratsbane 18y ago
The HTML 5 video and audio tags are coming - it may be a long time before they get here, but when they finally do will there still be a need for Flash or Silverlight? Anything else besides video that they do can be done with Javascript. Will we still need them in five years?
- wmf 18y ago
  I doubt the video tag will support DRM or more advanced Flash features like dynamic streaming. Most sites don't need these features, but those that do will keep using Flash.
  - utnick 18y ago
    I doubt audio or video recording will be supported by the video tag also
  - mustpax 18y ago
    It's my understanding that the video tag will support arbitrary back-end video processors. There's no reason that the video stream cannot be encrypted with some DRM scheme that's decrypted by the backend. Please correct me if I'm wrong about this.
    - wmf 18y ago
      Let me put it another way: Firefox won't implement DRM and Safari probably won't either (they want you to use iTunes).
    - ratsbane 18y ago
      I think that's correct. The current draft specifies that an implementation (browser) may support any video codec or no codec at all (e.g. lynx). There's a lot going into the determination of which codec to use if more than one might be appropriate. As wmf mentioned about - DRM and dynamic streaming, I'm wondering the same but I think that can be handled by appropriate codecs. (Which may be just moving the plug-in issue to be one involving codecs, but let's hope popular browsers will ship with sufficiently useful ones.) The whatwg draft is really quite interesting... http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video-and-audio-codecs-for-video-elements http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video-and...

17 points by Flemlord 18y ago

Q: What did you see in Flash that impressed you? Bowman: You see several things. You see a high-grade product that's in some form on 99 percent of the browsers. You've got something that's got mass usage. Secondly you see with Adobe a company committed to the customer experience in video with the Flash Player. We see a partner that continues to invest in their product. They have the same desire that we do. They want the Flash Player to be the best thing anybody has ever seen and we want that. When you partner with people like that, it's not a philosophical discussion. We know where we want to be now how do we get there. So once we filter out all the market-speak it pretty much boils down to that Flash has a better market-penetration.

seekely 18y ago
Maybe. But as a paying MLB.tv customer, the Silverlight implementation was TERRIBLE. Despite having all year to make improvements, the thing never worked even remotely correctly. I scolded myself as I signed up this year, but there really aren't any other options. To my surprise, I started up the first game today (go Tribe), and couldn't believe how much the player improved. Judging by how many more (functioning) features and polish are in the Flash player than were in the Silverlight player, I suspect it wasn't just market penetration.
- msie 18y ago
  Adobe has more at stake in seeing Flash succeed than MS does in seeing Silverlight succeed. This may be reflected by the amount of Adobe support and development committed to the Flash platform. I'm sure the Silverlight team is way smaller.
  - dantheman 18y ago
    True, but unfortunately adobe is stuck using AS3 on their VM; silverlight gets to leverage all the .net work. Hopefully they'll add threads to flash sometime in the future, that is the most limiting factor facing it today.
    - TJensen 18y ago
      I cringe to think what the developers at my work would do with threads in the Flash VM. I'd just as soon keep a single-threaded model.
      - dantheman 18y ago
        The single thread model has some serious limitations. For instance maybe you would like to load some images & then popup a component containing them. In a threaded world, you can have synchronous communication where it just waits till the download is complete before loading what depends on it. Right now you have to register callbacks, sure that's not too tough, but chaining like that makes it more difficult than it should be. download -> componentA > componentB > ComponentC whereas it might be easier to just go: CompnentA(file.download()); instead of file.Download (CompACallback, FaultCallback);
  - neovive 18y ago
    This is a major point in favor of Flash. The adoption and expansion of Flash into the enterprise is critical to the future of Adobe. Thus, Adobe will continue to invest heavily on improving and expanding the Flash player, API, support and development tools. Microsoft could drop Silverlight with little impact on the company -- it's not critical to the success of Windows at this point.

TweedHeads 18y ago

A nail in silverlight's coffin.

dannyr 18y ago
Doubt it. My video experiences with the last Olympics and CBS NCAA coverage were pretty good. If the next Olympics and next year's NCAA drops Silverlight in favor of Flash, then you could say that it probably won't take off. Flash has 5+ years headstart than Silverlight. Flash has also seen its share of technical issues and limitations. With regards to penetration rate, most PCs come with Silverlight pre-installed so this won't be much of an issue in the future.

ratsbane 18y ago

The HTML 5 video and audio tags are coming - it may be a long time before they get here, but when they finally do will there still be a need for Flash or Silverlight? Anything else besides video that they do can be done with Javascript. Will we still need them in five years?

wmf 18y ago
I doubt the video tag will support DRM or more advanced Flash features like dynamic streaming. Most sites don't need these features, but those that do will keep using Flash.
- utnick 18y ago
  I doubt audio or video recording will be supported by the video tag also
- mustpax 18y ago
  It's my understanding that the video tag will support arbitrary back-end video processors. There's no reason that the video stream cannot be encrypted with some DRM scheme that's decrypted by the backend. Please correct me if I'm wrong about this.
  - wmf 18y ago
    Let me put it another way: Firefox won't implement DRM and Safari probably won't either (they want you to use iTunes).
  - ratsbane 18y ago
    I think that's correct. The current draft specifies that an implementation (browser) may support any video codec or no codec at all (e.g. lynx). There's a lot going into the determination of which codec to use if more than one might be appropriate. As wmf mentioned about - DRM and dynamic streaming, I'm wondering the same but I think that can be handled by appropriate codecs. (Which may be just moving the plug-in issue to be one involving codecs, but let's hope popular browsers will ship with sufficiently useful ones.) The whatwg draft is really quite interesting... http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video-and-audio-codecs-for-video-elements http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video-and...