Ranting and raving about anything I feel like complaining about.

NBC, the NFL, Flash and Silverlight

by

Url: http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_...

Silverlight Logo

Much has been made in the blogosphere about the recent announcement that the NBC/NFL deal. NBC announced recently that they would be showing their live NFL games over the web via Flash versus Silverlight. I've heard a lot of hyperbole on both sides about why this happened.  I am deferring to something who I think actually doesn't have a horse in this race, an online video business analyst:

To quote him (if you haven't clicked over yet):

It's a shame that in our industry, some bloggers are more concerned with writing a headline just for drama sake, as opposed to actually getting the details right. In the past few days, at least half a dozen sites said that NBC was "dropping", "dumping" or "ditching" Silverlight in favor or Flash for streaming of football games on NBCSports and NFL.com....Problem is, none of this is true.

As far as I can tell, the decision was a business decision and not a technical decision. Let's try and be honest and not religious about this. Both Silverlight and Flash are great technologies. As someone who has invested a lot of time and money in Silverlight, I'd like it to do well but I could never say that it is superior in every way to Flash/Flex...because that just isn't true.  Hopefully pundits on both sides can do the same.

In fact, I am of the opinion that the best thing to happen to Flash developers was Silverlight.  Huh?  Yeah! The reason this was so good for Flash is it forced Adobe to start paying attention again. Competition is good for everyone and Adobe is being pushed on both features and price to be competitive with Microsoft. In that ecosystem everyone wins.

 
 

Comments

Gravatar Couldn't agree more.
Somewhat interesting to see that the Flash player implementation for the NFL has some of the the same limitations, the Olympics Silverlight one got so much critique about, i.e. no full screen and US only.
Ola Karlsson (Posted Wednesday, September 10, 2008)
Gravatar Ola,

Wonder why the full-screen issue (licensing?). I understand the US limitation, that's definitely licensing.
Shawn Wildermuth (Posted Wednesday, September 10, 2008)
Gravatar Yeah I understand the US only issue, being outside the US, I wish that wasn't the case but I fully understand that licensing etc. come in to play, IMHO the people complaining about it are just a bit naive of how things work.

Tim Heuer had an interesting post the other day discussing this, where he was speculating that the no full-screen limitation was due to adverts not being seen in full-screen mode.

He however pulled down the post same day, not quite sure what happened.
Ola Karlsson (Posted Wednesday, September 10, 2008)
Gravatar Agree adobe support of the flex community is hopless. I went to flex from being a MS developer before silverlight and I was used to all the freely available knowledge of MS but adobe seem to let 3rd parties do that work and then they of course charge for it. So bring it on.
Steve (Posted Wednesday, September 10, 2008)
Gravatar Silverlight's biggest problem right now is Microsoft's poor marketing. We've researched both Flex and Silverlight heavily and have decided to go Flex. We REALLY wanted to use Silverlight, but in our testing, we tried just building a simple application and it was just tedious, and none of our developers were excited to use it. With Flex, we were able to build a fairly complex prototype in a few days wired to .NET Web Services.

I ask facetiously . . . What is Silverlight--An RIA platform or a media player? A user control? Do I need Expression Web (which version?) to build a Silverlight app or can I use Visual Studio? VS2008 SP1 provides Silverlight Tools beta 2 . . . huh?

I'm not a blind zealout either, but Adobe is definitely light years ahead of MS in terms of a unified RIA development platform, while Silverlight has the appearance of a Rube Goldberg machine . . .
T A (Posted Wednesday, September 10, 2008)
Gravatar TA, Silverlight has problems, but not being a unified RIA development platform, is not one of them.

I have to really question your conclusions, because it appears there was some bias in the selection process. I don't have a problem with that, but come on, don't pretend to claim it was on the up and up.
Fallon Massey (Posted Wednesday, September 10, 2008)
Gravatar Fallon,

Clearly I am biased towards Silverlight (as I make my living on it) but I see the value in competition to push both monolithic companies to making lives on both sides better.
Shawn Wildermuth (Posted Wednesday, September 10, 2008)
Gravatar It's funny to hear all of this speculation. I've worked with NFL (can't explain the context) and this is all related to the cost of a technology shift and player penetration. They have internal resources that are very good at developing Flash applications. So they have to ask, is it worth it to invest time and resources in training and learning a new technology? Does that technology offer enough of a benefit to justify that? Probably not.

Also, player penetration is key for this kind of thing. Silverlight just doesn't have it yet.

So ask yourself... why would NFL invest time and money in moving to a new technology that fewer of their viewers can use without needing a new plug-in?

I love Silverlight. I love the competition and I develop in both technologies, but I'd never recommend going Silverlight in a case like this. Maybe that sheds some light on things.
Inside Info (Posted Thursday, September 11, 2008)
Gravatar Inside,

Yup, its usually a Business Case decision...rarely purely technological...CIO's aren't necessarily dogmatic about specific camps.
Shawn Wildermuth (Posted Thursday, September 11, 2008)
Gravatar TA - As a MS dev who supports a website with a large amount of interactive Flash applications talking to both socket based services and web services, I disagree about the level of support and information available from Adobe. I've registered on Adobe's site, downloaded the eclipse-based Flex tool, and scoured their website looking for information. (more on Google searches in a second) Were it not for O'Reily's books on Actionscript development, it would be another order of magnitude slower to do any development.

MSFT is far from perfect, but for Silverlight the now only months old Beta of v2 has very good online support for creating applications and accomplishing tasks using the source of today, Google searches and blogs. Sure, this might be partly due to the fact that there are tens of thousands of Actionscript examples on how to play or stop frames and other simple designer-related tasks, but when searching for socket or asmx the information is still absent though, and seemingly kept as the secret sauce to protect seasoned developers' secret methods of accomplishing those tasks.

Trying to train someone new to RIA on either platform means that even without high adoption rates yet, Silverlight is far easier to get tasks done in. This may not be true during research stage, but during prototyping it should be apparent if your sources if information mimic mine.

Regarding the NFL, I don't necessarily disagree but am surprised that unless the requirements explicitly exclude Silverlight for full-screen or some other restriction, when MS would not offset the additional cost for dual-deployment as was done for the Olympics.
Cliff Jacobson (Posted Thursday, September 11, 2008)
Gravatar TA,

I did try Flex Builder 3 and also the Flash. I have to say the Visual Studio and Expression win on their productivity. Can you imagine that you can develop applications from the very backend (eg. SQL databases) straight to the frontend (eg. Silverlight) by yourself with, most of the time, drag and drop?

You may need at least 2 people and longer development time to do the same jobs in Flex and Flash.

I can't see anything can be quicker in solution delivery in Visual Studio and Expression. For that reason, also considering Silverlight adoption is still at Beta stage and has a low adoption for most Internet users, my company just starts converting its intranet applications into Silverlight and also waiting for chances to convert the Internet applications which were developed in Flash.

So, if you really don't like Silverlight, just don't use it.

Lixin
lixin (Posted Wednesday, September 17, 2008)

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