Video Platforms and Silverlight and Flash

I was a bit dismayed to read Tim Anderson’s piece on the ITV catch-up service in which Silverlight catches some flak – slightly unfairly in my view. To be fair to Tim he doesn’t actually point to Silverlight as the issue but you can read the article and sure get that impression (given the word Silverlight is used 8 or 9 times…).

The point made is that the client tech is always going to get the blame because it is the most visible part of the puzzle. Reasonable of course (if not earth-shattering analysis), but it’s very unlikely to be the cause of the problem which is much more likely to be to do with necessary infrastructure and bandwidth (let’s talk CDN capacity, encoding rates etc.) to stream the video content. There’s a nice session from Mix09 on the Microsoft media platform here by Alex Zambelli.

After all, even Flash can suffer from FAIL. Before you leap on me and say “But that’s not the fault of Flash”: I know. That’s the point.

But to suggest it may be “too late for Silverlight” is a little silly. Silverlight is being used by ITV, Sky and Setanta in the UK (you can read the Setanta case study here in which EMC Conchango were involved) so that’s not too bad in terms of broadcaster adoption in the UK.

Crucially though, all of these projects have a fraction of budget that the BBC had/has. It’s not surprising that this upsets the commercial broadcasters, and it demonstrates a (maybe deliberately) naive industry view to compare the offerings from (for instance) ITV with BBC. That’s not to say they shouldn’t get it right, but it’s a complex puzzle that doesn’t have Flash or Silverlight as the end result – however much that would be a neat conclusion.