
Why baseball benched Microsoft Silverlight - Flemlord
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10212843-93.html
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ratsbane
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
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.

~~~
mustpax
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.

~~~
ratsbane
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...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video-and-audio-
codecs-for-video-elements)

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trezor
_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
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
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
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
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
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);

------
TweedHeads
A nail in silverlight's coffin.

~~~
dannyr
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.

