Microsoft Silverlight, a lot of marketing but little reality

At the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters), which took place in Las Vegas last April, Microsoft launched a new platform for Internet Multimedia Applications called Silverlight. This new platform comes together with a bunch of authoring products called MS Expression, which has a lot of flavors and it’s very difficult, as usual, to understand their real purpose, we are going to talk more about in another post.

At first glance, Silverlight seems to be a very great solution, with almost everything we’ve being asking the Windows Media Team in the last 4 years and it really looks like is filling up the gap with Flash video and the Flash ecosystem itself. Finally, it’s possible to change the Player interface and the its basic elements, you can add objects that interact with the video (the video is an object BTW), thus adding value and interactivity to your multimedia applications based on Windows Media Technology. It uses an Microsoft XML file, called XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) to address the layout of the application and you can use JavaScript as development language.

After researching more about this new platform and participating in the development forums, I’ve found that Microsoft has a long road to go with Silverlight, it doesn’t support several important features like Server Side Playlists, Streaming over RTSP and it can’t interact with a USB webcam to publish a video on the Internet like Flash does.

Comparing with the Flash ecosystem this new platform has a long way to go, it still supports Windows XP SP2, Vista and MacOS X only, of course there is no plans to support Linux (besides the fact that Miguel de Icaza said he will port Silverlight to Linux, a project called Moonlight) . The tools for developer are really poor (MS Expression), it almost seems to be all beta software with, sometimes, awkward and ugly behavior and non intuitive interfaces, totally the opposite of Flash Professional IDE.