“In a blow to Microsoft, ITV has switched the technology powering its web streaming service from Silverlight to Adobe’s more widely installed Flash,” Chris Williams reports for The Register.
“‘ITV can confirm it has switched from Microsoft’s Silverlight to Adobe Flash to support the ITV Player on ITV.com,’ a spokeswoman said today,” Williams reports.
Full article here.
Nick Wingfield reports for The Wall Street Journal, “Over the past two years, Microsoft has poured resources into its technology for online video and animation — dubbed Silverlight — and has boosted its ability to deliver high-definition video with the technology. Silverlight is positioned as a rival to Adobe’s technology, which is known as Flash.”
“Adobe’s dominance with Flash presents Microsoft with the kind of brick wall that has stymied many tech companies as they laid siege to Microsoft’s own software businesses, like operating systems and productivity applications,” Wingfield reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dirty Pierre le Punk” for the heads up.]
What they are doing is this: So good for them to fail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
I hear Apple is adopting silverlight for the iPhone to help with all the video incompatibility.
Its really starting to look as if Microsoft can only do only harm to both itself and anyone who comes in contact with the company!
Question: Is it time to return the money to the stockholder?
Answer: Maybe!
“I hear Apple is adopting silverlight for the iPhone to help with all the video incompatibility.”
Ok, I just threw up in my mouth. =)
Thought I heard a commode whoooooosh coming from the UK. Question … did it leave skid marks on the porcelain as it swirled round and round the shittery?
Oh, good.
Given Microsoft’s recent track record, I think we should buy Ballmer & his boys this t-shirt.
HTML 5 is the end of these two band aids
Can’t wait ’til Toyota drops it from their site.
Just my $0.02
@Thelonious Monk,
And I heard that Mafia$ucks is moving to using all open standards.
Equally as unlikely.
One of the eHow articles referenced at the bottom of this article starts with the line “Microsoft is synonymous with technology.”
Yeah, right.
Like John Dillinger is synonymous with banking.
> I hear Apple is adopting silverlight for the iPhone to help with all the video incompatibility.
I never use silverlight, but in case it catches on, it’s great that Apple’s adding it. That’s the last straw–I’m getting an iPhone tomorrow! This is exactly why I’m switching to Apple: always adding new features.
Meanwhile, I hope Microsoft figures out all those incompatibility issues you mention.
It’s scary what the world would look like today if Steve Jobs hadn’t come back and saved Apple in 1998. Microsoft would be in charge of the full Internet experience, all the operating systems used in the world, and all the “productivity” software used in the world. Not to mention cell phones, too. And there would be NO innovation happening in the tech world at all, just like there was NO innovation that happened during the time when Steve Jobs wasn’t at Apple.
SL works well with Netflix steaming.. based on my limited experience.. is seems better than Flash…
To hell with both Silverlight and Flash. We need to move toward web-standards and away from proprietary, CPU-hogging plug-ins.
——RM
I don’t understand how HTML5 helps with all this video stuff. Even if you manage to do away with Silverlight or Flash, you still have to stream the video file and then decode it in the browser. I can’t imagine that HTML5 has endless support for every video format under the sun, so we’re still going to be limited, no?
@hairbo:
SilverLight and Flash are entire runtime engines, not just video players. They add an entire sub-system on top of your browser to run content/applications. Modern web browser (HTML5 based) are becoming standards-based runtimes in their own right. Why bother adding another one on top of it. It just eats away at system resources. Currently Flash is almost necessary for compatibility reasons, SilverLight can be ignored altogether.
The HTML5 streaming specification leaves it up to the developers of the browser to choose which format to support. Webkit -> H.264, Gecko -> Ogg Vorbis, Chrome -> H.265 and Ogg Vorbis.
Yeah, great. Now ITV just needs to make some programmes worth watching.
…Which is probably just as unlikely as Silverlight appearing for the iPhone!
My experience-silverlight works better than flash.
Less CPU intensive.
Just ask Netflix.
Now we just need to have Netflix abandon SL.
Oh, I forgot Apple fanatics can’t abide anything Microsoft-whether it’s done well or not.
Adobe products sucks-flash, Photoshop, etc. are crippled or not as advanced as they are on windows.
MS comes out with a credible flash competitor and it works nicely on macs, but who cares MS must die.
Idiots.
When they’re done well, no complaints. But it is the editorial opinion of this site, and most of its readers, that by and large Microsoft is does not deserve merit praise for most of their offerings. There are exceptions. The .NET framework has a lot to appreciate and itself may be the sole legacy coming out of the last ten years at Microsoft. But even .NET is just an attempt to out-Java Java.
I’ll also add that if Flash were not on the way out, that an alternative such as Silverlight would be a great necessity, and only a behemoth like Microsoft would be able to force adoption to high enough levels to make it practical for developers to adopt. But the fact is that Flash _is_ on the way out. The end is nigh… behold the HTML 5/JavaScript stack and the various rich media libraries that it brings with it. So, no need for Silverlight, whether it’s better or worse than Flash.
@Scott Rose,
Yeah, that or the rest of us would be really good at building Linux boxes!
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The idea is to get rid of Flash and SilverLight type proprietary plug-ins, and use HTML 5 and the browser to leverage the local video processor to do the grunt work of video decoding. The complaint, of course, is that some video codecs like H.264 are proprietary, but the licensing for H.264 is relatively low, and it is a very efficient codec. This is also a much more secure way to do video, as well as far more power-friendly (important for portable devices). I’ve never loaded SL on my MacBook, and I’m hoping that very soon I can dump Flash, too.