Silverlight 2.0 Released 164
rfernand79 writes "Via Scott Guthrie's Blog for Microsoft, we find out that Silverlight 2.0 has been released. The blog post notes some interesting statistics, including the magnitude of video streamed during the Olympics and the Democratic National Convention (both using Silverlight). 'Hello Worlds' and educational links are included in the post."
The Problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:About time (Score:5, Interesting)
Silverlight 1.0 should never have come out. Silverlight 1.0 vs Silverlight 2.0 is like comparing Flash to Flex, and make the gab between the two 5 times wider. SL1.0 was useless as hell, and even several of Microsoft's more vocal employees and public figures said that much. It was just something the marketing dep pushed when development of SL2.0 was taking too long. And that same marketing dep messed up big time.
Fortunately, Silverlight 2.0 (which really should be SL 1.0) actually has -some- features.
Thank you Microsoft (Score:1, Interesting)
Flash10 appeared as a regular update on my Fedora installation(adobe repo), just when it was released.
Never would had happened without you.
I thought the Olympics was a silverlight failure? (Score:5, Interesting)
My impression was that the amount of Olympics streaming using Silverlight was less than YouTube during the same time period. If so, it doesn't seem like much of a success to me.
(Calling it a success because people installed silverlight isn't much. Afterall, the same people would have probably installed a rootkit and trojan in order to watch the Olympic streaming. They just don't care.)
Re:I thought the Olympics was a silverlight failur (Score:2, Interesting)
My impression was that the amount of Olympics streaming using Silverlight was less than YouTube during the same time period. If so, it doesn't seem like much of a success to me.
If the bar for success for video on the web is deliver more content than YouTube, than there has not been a success in web video since YouTube launched :). 9.9 million hours of video in 17 days is a whole lot of video.
Some better metrics for success might be:
Was it profitable for NBC?
Did viewers get a good experience?
Did it innovate anything new in video delivery?
My biased opinion is "yes" in all three categories.
I've got this blog post with some more details about Silverlight and the Olympics:
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Final-Olympics-numbers/ [on10.net]
(Calling it a success because people installed silverlight isn't much. Afterall, the same people would have probably installed a rootkit and trojan in order to watch the Olympic streaming. They just don't care.)
People don't care what software they install as long as it delivers what they want? Probably true, but that sounds more like a feature of Silverlight, not a bug.
If a consumer is always aware what technology is in their media player, the player is probably too obtrusive. The user should be mainly aware of the awesome experience.