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Video Wars: Silverlight Vs. Flash

  • Reuters, Monday, August 25, 2008 11:15 AM
Microsoft's Silverlight technology is locked in a battle with Adobe's Flash over the future of Web video. Microsoft received a huge boost when NBC decided to use Silverlight as its video player. More than 40 million U.S. viewers have gone to NBC's Olympics site to watch some of the 2,200 hours of live footage from the Beijing games. Silverlight, a free download, is required to stream the events live.

By bulking up its user base, Microsoft is also looking to win over developers, too. "It's quickly becoming a very popular way to build next generation applications. There's a lot of interest in capturing the hearts and minds of developers," said Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research. "It'll be a big business."

However, right now, Flash is dominant-more than 80% of the video on the planet runs on the Adobe software. Meanwhile, nearly half of the visitors to NBCOlympics.com did not have Silverlight technology. Further afield, both technologies face competition from rich Internet applications, which are cheaper to deploy and maintain than traditional software.

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