- Posted by justin on March 5, 2008
WOW, Silverlight 1.x is having 1.5 million downloads per day. I wonder how this compare to the number of browsers with flash installed.
Downloads:
Details:
2.0 enables silverlight to run on mobile devices.
Adaptive streaming: allows silverlight to look on the client side to see the client capabilities and network settings, then it will pick the appropriate bit rate for the video. It will auto change the bit rate if client or network changes. No need to write any code to take advantage of this. Enable you to plug in any adaptive streaming algorithm or streaming provider.
Microsoft and Move networks partnering. Move networks provides streaming for lots of tv networks. This is great news. I have streamed HD versions of Lost from abc.com which Move networks provides and it worked great.
Better tco for progressive downloading. Example: would be watching a YouTube video where it buffers before streaming. With this type of streaming, the server tried to send as much of a payload as it can to the client but many times user closes the browser which cost extra money/bandwidth. With the new silverlight tco it will send a quick payload so that video starts and then you can say how far to stay in front of the stream, so you might only stay 10 seconds ahead of what the user is watching.
Ability to embed ads in your silverlight app. Publisher can control the ability to skip over ads or to force the users to wait for the ad. Can dynamically loads ads as the video plays. This doesn't seem to be anything different than what is delivering in a lot of streaming content today but I since I haven't done anything with streaming content at all, I don't know how much easier this makes it for publishers to do this.
Double click support for silverlight 2.0 for in-stream products.
Olympic web site preview. They will be streaming events live. The web site looks pretty cool. Finally I wont have to worry about NBC not showing the events I want to see. You will be able to rewind the streaming video. Essentially this is Tivo for streaming. Will have multiple views of events (they showed a track and field event with 4 different videos all streaming at the same time)
2.0 beta 1 is a 4.6 meg download. It does not require .NET framework to be install previously. The install is only a couple of seconds.
2.0 Beta includes lots of web controls and includes an open source license. The license will allow you to modify and reship the controls.
Shipping a unit test framework for silverlight. To help seed they are including over 2000 unit test for the silverlight controls.
Controls will support skinning and customization for how the controls look. Silverlight also has control templates that control the look of the control.
Will be shipping visual studio support that will allow you to create silverlight applications. Full intelisense and debugging support.
Expression Blend is a great designer environment for silverlight applications. It shares project structure with visual studio.
Hard Rock web site demo rocked. Lots of cool interactions. http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/
Microsoft is providing tools to do image stitching and zooming.