Zachmann.NET
Silverlight Stumbles
Silverlight 2 at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and Democratic National Convention.
Well, the results are in on the ambitious effort to offer enhanced video of every event of the 2008 Beijing Olympics -- more than 2,000 hours of video in all -- on NBC's Olympics site using Microsoft Silverlight technology. Users were promised that with Silverlight 2 installed they would "be able to watch the video in Enhanced Mode, which includes a larger size video and the ability to view up to four videos simultaneously."
So how did it go? Well, better than it might have, but clearly not as well as Microsoft would have liked. The best evidence of that is the remarkable lack of the usual upbeat, self-congratulatory press releases and pronouncements from Microsoft following the event. After broadly touting Silverlight 2 at the Olympics early in the year, Microsoft fell curiously silent as the Games drew near. As of early September, the most recent item on Microsoft's Silverlight News page was the link to Microsoft Corporate Vice President and .NET Developer Division head Scott Guthrie's June 6, 2008, blog entry announcing the availability of Silverlight 2 beta 2.
That entry offers a clue to Microsoft's Silverlight silence. Despite Redmond's new-found caution about committing to release dates for products in development, it was clearly expected that Silverlight 2 beta 2 would be out in May and, more important, that the release to manufacturing version of Silverlight 2 would be available for the NBC Olympics site at the end of August. It was not. So NBC was in the uncomfortable position of asking users to download and install a still-not-entirely-stable beta version of Silverlight, rather than a finished product.
If millions of viewers downloaded Silverlight 2 and had a successful experience with it watching the 2008 Beijing Olympics, we would have heard something about it. The deafening roar of silence means that Microsoft is none too eager to talk about the number of users who downloaded Silverlight 2, or about their experiences once they did.
Speaking Volumes
Comments and questions from the users who actually did download Silverlight 2 beta 2 for the NBC Olympics site speak volumes. There's no question that it worked pretty well for some, and maybe even most; but there's equally no question that many users struggled with the experience.
First, let's mention the keen disappointment of those in Canada, Europe and elsewhere where NBC did not have distribution rights to the video. They simply were unable to view any video at all at the NBC site -- a point that Microsoft and NBC neglected to mention prior to the launch. The Web is a global market, and companies need to show more respect for their global customers when providing content online.
But there were plenty of other problems, as the NBCOlympics.com Video FAQs testify. Many users who already had Silverlight installed had to install it again. PowerPC-based Apple Macs could not run it at all. Absence of support for network proxies requiring user authentication in Silverlight 2 kept others from accessing live content. And streaming video performance for even one stream (let alone four at once) left a lot to be desired for many users.
The Microsoft Silverlight forums site, if you search on "Olympics," further confirms some of the struggles. It appears that only a relatively small number of fairly technical users actually tried to use Silverlight 2 to watch the Olympics via the NBC site -- and even they did not have a very easy time of it.
Electoral Season
Microsoft continues to push Silverlight in front of large audiences, using it to build the Democratic National Convention Web site for the Democratic National Committee's gathering in Denver at the end of August. But my experience is damning. I spent more than 20 minutes twiddling with the player and I was not able to get it to work, even after I downloaded the Move Networks plug-in.
This may be why none of the major networks appear to be using Silverlight 2 at all for their streaming coverage. The two that did the best job and provided the most streaming live and archived coverage are Fox News and NBC.
These two are significantly ahead of the others. Despite NBC's Microsoft connection with MSNBC and the Olympics site, neither network used Silverlight 2 to stream video from the nominating conventions in Denver and Minneapolis. Both NBC and Fox News relied on Adobe Flash player.
The contest is not yet over. The final returns are not yet in. But Silverlight 2 obviously did not score the decisive victory Microsoft had hoped for this summer. In production use at major Web sites it's still well behind in the polls. Getting Silverlight 2 finally out of beta and into production may give it a boost. But given the results so far, large user organizations are likely to remain -- perhaps with good reason -- cautious about betting big on Silverlight for production use any time soon.
About the Author
William F. Zachmann, born before the modern digital computer was invented, has lived with them (and made his living off of them) all his life. He was director of research for The Forum Corp. in the mid-'70s and senior vice president of corporate research at International Data Corp. (IDC) in the '80s. He has a copy of Windows 1.0 that Bill Gates signed for him the night it was rolled out at Comdex Fall '85. Zachmann is now director of Canopus Research Inc. He programs in C# using Visual Studio 2005 with a focus on ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005.