Silverlight for the masses, is it time

Question

We are launching a site that is media heavy and looking at using silverlight, since most of our video library is in wmv and from what i understand flash serving still costs a couple bucks.

Is silverlight really adopted out there, I know i use it as well as a bunch of developers for internal apps but as far as a web application is it ready to go, i went through a mac install with safari and had to restart my whole browser to install it, not exactly a great user experience. I also noticed that MS doesnt even use it for http://video.msn.com and also the few sites that have launched get crazy MAC people crying bloody murder , read http://www.itwriting.com/blog/641-mac-users-refusing-to-install-silverlight.html where one New York Times reader said "Nope. Not going to use anything from Microsoft. If reading the NYT requires MS products then, for this reader, goodbye NYT." when asked to install silverlight for NYT site. Tech wise moving forward I like Silverlight and some of the things i can do from a framework / wpf perspective and want to move ahead with it just not sure it's the out there enough yet. Just wondering what people think out there

Answer 1

I think that if you have a user base that refuses to upgrade from Internet Explorer 6, good luck with getting anything else adopted, including Silverlight.

The thing can be installed more or less automatically just like Flash, for crying out loud. How difficult could it be?

The argument up to now has been, "Flash is already installed on most computers, so it already has high adoption." But that's a chicken and egg problem. How did Flash get adopted in the first place?

The NYT reader just has a prejudice. Clearly he believes that Microsoft is the evil empire. There's really nothing you can do about that. The real question is, how prevalent is this attitude? Certainly it will be common among the Linux/open source crowd, but it's hard for me to believe that this attitude would be prevalent among the average user. If anything, the Microsoft name is a warm and fuzzy for them.

Answer 2

I personally think Silverlight will pick up pace on business applications just because it's much programmer friendly and the fact that you can program it in .NET languages means it is much easier to reuse and maintain your business logic.

However, in terms of consumer application I don't think it can beat Flash, who's got a much larger install base and already used by most major companies. Also, don't forget HTML5, which now has integrated video element supported by major browsers including Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Despite codec arguments, it is another strong contender, which will squeeze Silverlight's market share even further.

Answer 3

The only major sites using silverlight are ones that microsoft either owns, or has paid to use it, and most of the ones that they paid for switched back to flash. The version number may be approaching 3.0, but it is still a very new and immature platform that is not as widely installed as flash (which is pushing 97% of all browsers).

If you are talking wmv vs silverlight, I would go silverlight. If you are talking flash vs silverlight, I would say flash hands down. If you want to be forward thinking, serve stuff up with the HTML <video> tag, with flash as a fallback.

Answer 4

As a user and as a web developer I like sticking to the bare minimum. Like it or not Flash has pretty much become the standard platform for rich media on the internet. Everyone I know has flash to use videos from common sources like You Tube.

Since money seems to be an issue I might suggest Flowplayer, an open source Flash video player. Currently it only supports mpg, mov, and avi, but it's fairly easy to convert wmv to other formats using open source tools.

Here is Flowplayer: http://flowplayer.org/v2/player/index.html

Here are some simple instructions for converting video: http://flowplayer.org/v2/tutorials/my-movies.html

Answer 5

I remember that MLB went from showing those games from silverlight back to flash due to a few issues that didn't get resolve. It work pretty well on the Olympics, but beyond that I can't say how good or bad it is. Do you have any idea what percentage of users have Silverlight installed for their browsers? That might be something to look at.

Answer 6

I've heard that desktop Silverlight penetration is around 30%. Flash is somewhere north of 95%.

Going with Flash seems the easy decision now. I can certainly imagine a lot of Mac users seeing the "install Silverlight" message and saying, "Ick! No!"

In the long run, probably most Windows PCs will have Silverlight. Diehard Mac fans may never install it.

Meanwhile, I've seen more and more people who don't install Java, and who just pass on any site that says to install Java.

Adobe's only weakness now is mobile. They seem to have desktop locked up tight.