Last week at the VON conference I had an opportunity to speak about Silverlight as a platform for video delivery. I only had 20 minutes to get the message across and I didn't want it to sound like a sales pitch. I tried to think of some clever ways around this but in the end I realized that the audience just needed to hear the facts so they could decide for themselves what the value might be. I tried to be as direct and honest as possible and to leave out the marketing. If you boil Silverlight and Windows Media down into 20 minutes it goes like this –

1. Windows Media has a long track record of delivering quality video over the Internet – almost 10 years.
2. Windows Media Server is still one of (probably the most) the most cost effective ways of delivering *streaming* media online. Usually about 30% less expensive than Flash.
3. Very few platforms can deliver Live video as effectively (quality, price, perf) as Windows Media.
4. However, the client story sucked. The biggest failing of Windows Media was that the player was not cross-platform, customizable and it buffered.
5. Silverlight fixes the Windows Media client issue!
6. Now you can deliver Windows Media (Live, Streaming, Progressive) cross-platform, cross –browser
7. You can customize the player look and feel
8. Limited to no buffering
9. As an interactive application platform it provides a rich set of capabilities on par with other technologies
10. It has the potential to lower the cost of development by opening it up to a wider range of developers.

The two main themes that I wanted my customers to walk away with were that Windows Media is still a viable option because there is a new client technology that fixes the problems of the past. Because of the XAML based nature of Silverlight and that it supports a wide range of languages (Ruby, Python, Java Script, C#, VB.net) you can better divide tasks and specialize resources thus potentially lowering costs.

Most were pleasantly surprised and many people confessed to me that they've been struggling with how to do live streaming on other platforms. HSN.tv is a great example of what you can do with Silverlight and live broadcasts. Limelight, Akamai and others have very extensive build outs and offerings for delivering live streams on Windows Media. In almost every case it is far less expensive than other mechanisms. I think these economics combined with the quality (Silverlight has the ability to deliver HD quality streams to both Mac and Windows clients) of the video are making people look at Windows Media and Silverlight as a possible alternative to the current industry trend.

You can find the deck I presented here.

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