Silverlight Video Search
Monday, April 30, 2007
Will Microsoft be able to make an impact with their Silverlight multimedia offering? Hopefully it has more substance than its current promotional video. Of course Microsoft is guaranteed a small audience for the technology through its own devices. No doubt the Xbox 360 and Zune players will support the plugin in short order. Yet can they seriously challenge Flash? Microsoft has shown before in its bastardization of Java that not every platform it creates is always accepted by the industry. Flash is a product with over a decade of backing in the multimedia industry, and the primary reason Adobe bought Macromedia for $3.4 billion. It's the product that enabled YouTube to be sold for $1.4 billion. Millions upon millions of people have the Flash plugin installed. So most people are probably not going to care what kind of video that Silverlight delivers because Flash has already delivered quality through a codec by On2 Technologies (a former Connors client). The one weakness in Flash is search. Google and its brethren will continue to have difficulty indexing Flash for the foreseeable future. Even if search engines can figure out how to find the text in the animation, what frame do you lead users to? If Silverlight can solve this problem and intelligently incorporate text so search engines can actually find this content without relying on user-submitted tags, then the battle will get exciting. Labels: Adobe, flash, Microsoft, search, silverlight, video
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