Q&A With Microsoft's Ben Waggoner
Silverlight has been called a "Flash killer." Without agreeing or disagreeing with that statement, how does Silverlight relate to Flash?
Silverlight and Flash both enable embedding video along with other rich media in an internet browser, and they both have a small, low-friction installer. But this is where the comparison ends. The approach Silverlight takes to integrate with existing web assets, along with the media platform it builds on is fundamentally different from Flash.
From a streaming perspective, Windows Media always had a strong set of codecs, performance, servers, CDN support, etc. By taking advantage of these Windows Media technologies, Silverlight is able to deliver more cost-effective streaming for live and on-demand content. At NAB we saw an overwhelming response from customers looking for the quality, scalability, and reliability of Windows Media, coupled with new, rich and interactive capabilities that were once only available from a single vendor.
With Silverlight we have elevated the flexibility and presentation capabilities, while continuing to build on the strengths of Windows Media. With an established ecosystem of compression tools and workflow solutions, Silverlight-based experiences have the advantage of significantly lower costs to operate in both authoring and serving, and better CDN pricing, not to mention more efficient audio encoding with WMA. Additionally, VC-1 is a re-editable format, used by broadcasters for high-quality video archiving all the way out to bandwidth-constrained mobile scenarios. We've also done the hard work of enabling native support for Windows Media technologies in silicon. On the technical level, VC-1 provides much faster decode, which lets us for example, do HD playback on a machine that can only do standard definition using other solutions. We’ve had great results encoding in 720p24 for Silverlight delivery, at 4 Mbps CBR for streaming on broadband. It’s amazing to see real streaming in HD to a web browser—finally—and it's all possible via a small plug-in that's only 2MB in size.
Finally, we care a lot about being in every tool—that’s why Windows Media has near universal support in most recognized industry tools.
What would you say to customers that already have an investment in Flash?
Take a look at Silverlight—it's not like you have to rip and replace your existing investments, Silverlight can co-exist, even communicate with Flash, thanks to the way it natively supports the browser. You can also host Silverlight-based applications on Linux, Solaris, whatever web server you want. Naturally we hope you'll find the bandwidth and cost savings of our servers and tools to be appealing.
The Silverlight team is really listening to what customers want first, and responding. This is just the tip of the iceberg; Microsoft is in this space for the long haul.