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198 Comments
- SkeletalBias, on 09/05/2008, -36/+142I don't blame them.
- SetOverSet, on 09/06/2008, -38/+142They didn't dump Silverlight. The deal was for the Olympics. I'm sure Adobe has a deal for them with the NFL. BTW, Adobe totally failed and with LESS traffic. And to top it off, did anyone catch the HD quality videos from the DNC? Yeah, let's see Flash do that. Silverlight FTW!
- inactive, on 09/05/2008, -48/+147Yeah, thanks NBC.
So you ***** up the Olympics for everyone who isn't running windows, and THEN you go back to a solution that works for everyone.
***** you, NBC. - dballagh, on 09/05/2008, -25/+120Yey, now I can watch videos from my new NetBook PC running linux. :)
- CarnivalOfDust, on 09/06/2008, -6/+100They should go to something stable like Realplayer. The advantage of Realplayer over Flash i
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s in it's ability to reliably str
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[Feed lost] - Arowin, on 09/06/2008, -4/+58I like it how most of these comments seem to have not even read the article...
"NBC's move didn't pay off last night. The feed was unwatchable over a broadband connection, serving up freeze fames, blurry action and skipping back and forth as the it tried to buffer." - SetOverSet, on 09/06/2008, -4/+47Probably ZERO. It's about money.
- Xizer, on 09/06/2008, -24/+67Fail.
Silverlight > Flash Video in pretty much every way. Silverlight is just designed better. - slugicide, on 09/05/2008, -15/+53This Linux user emailed a complaint during the Olympics. I wonder how much feedback influenced this decision?
- lordving, on 09/06/2008, -15/+53Obvious fact most of these people forget...Silverlight worked great. I watched the olympics in high detail over a slow dsl broadband connection. You can't even begin to compare it to the low quality of Adobe
- benologist, on 09/06/2008, -8/+38"Because, as SAI notes, while 40 million US visitors to NBCOlympics.com didn't have Silverlight installed, Adobe Flash is already installed on some 98 percent of Internet-connected computers. NBC's move didn't pay off last night. The feed was unwatchable over a broadband connection, serving up freeze fames, blurry action and skipping back and forth as the it tried to buffer."
I've worked with Flash and C# for years and recently started messing around with Silverlight. I suspect Silverlight outperforms Flash by quite a bit, the problem is there's very few examples in the wild that demonstrate what it's capable of. - santasing, on 09/06/2008, -2/+28That's what you think...muhahahahah
- Bill Gates - SetOverSet, on 09/06/2008, -31/+54You're an idiot. They didn't F up the Olympics for people not running Windows. It worked just fine on Mac.
- inactive, on 09/06/2008, -5/+26Nothing. The various codecs are very similar in performance(on windows, on older non intel macs it is a differnt story).
On the other hand, Silverlight video streams are scalable, while flash video streams are not. - inactive, on 09/06/2008, -7/+28Don't let facts get in the way of MS bashing. ;)
- gozroth, on 09/06/2008, -0/+20It's nothing personal, they just agreed to see other people. See, NBC has this long history with flash and.... she just wants to see if there's anything still there. NBC hopes Silverlight the best of luck and hopes he doesn't take this too hard. Silverlight has a hard time with relationships.
- inactive, on 09/06/2008, -8/+28Scalable streams. Complete end to end platform. Hardware acclerated encoding. There are a bunch more things as well. Those are just off the top of my head.
- dsmx, on 09/06/2008, -4/+24NO you can't, no-one can didn't you read the article?
- limeyTart, on 09/06/2008, -9/+28I have been working on a sizable project that is an implementation of a HD Broadband player using Silverlight, I think probably the bigger problem is that its still under heavy development. We have been working with Microsoft Silverlight developers to figure certain things out that it currently doesn't support - they have been working hard getting things resolved and Silverlight overall is a pretty impressive framework.
I run Linux, so the Olympics player not working was annoying - but its Windows users that would make up 95%+ of the users for NBC - I would imagine its more to do with actual continued development efforts and the fact there are just more Flash developers available than SIlverlight developers. - DarkShroud, on 09/06/2008, -5/+22I'm going to assume that's sarcasm and you actually read the article.
"NBC's move didn't pay off last night. The feed was unwatchable over a broadband connection, serving up freeze fames, blurry action and skipping back and forth as the it tried to buffer." - KAMiKAZOW, on 09/06/2008, -4/+21Better or less bad? I've seen nothing, neither Flash nor Silverlight, that's better than a simple MPEG-4 streaming server that delivers video in various bandwidths to a browser plugin. It works on almost every platform, 32 or 64 bit, in almost every browser. Totem, MPlayer, VLC, QuickTime, etc. offer good browser plugins.
- inactive, on 09/06/2008, -5/+21Well in defense of the Microsoft haters, they are gonna lie about it even if they read the article.
- uruururr, on 09/06/2008, -2/+172008 olympics powered by microsoft silverlight. NBC+Microsoft.
big business runs on incentives and advertising... welcome to the world. - fluxion, on 09/06/2008, -0/+15in fairness, how many of those [Buffering] moments were when we were still on dial-up? real-time streaming video wasnt really a given back then
- inactive, on 09/06/2008, -18/+33Anti Microsoft Fanboys jumping on the wagon again.. The deal was to use Microsoft's Silverlight Technology during the olympics only. That deal has now expired that is why they reverted to Adobe's flash. Silverlight is more scalable for high end content delivery than Flash btw. compare the specs.
- kelway, on 09/06/2008, -8/+22For a nice example of Silverlight: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ (not video)
Just keep on zooming....... - locojones, on 09/06/2008, -11/+25I watched an incredible amount of live Olympic broadcasts on NBC's Olympic page via Silverlight, and I had nothing but positive experiences with it. The video, even at its highest quality, was smooth and free of artifacts and buffering, even with my moderate speed DSL. Plus, the Olympic app allowed you to stream up to four Olympic events at once, which I did on a number of occasions, without a hiccup.
So I honestly don't understand the problems experienced by those complaining about resources. Speaking from my own experience, after streaming hours on end, when I checked my hard drive at the end of any given night of coverage, the only thing Silverlight created was a miniscule 400-600meg temporary file. I was surprised it wasn't vastly larger, given the vast amount of video that I pushed every night.
And this was on my paltry non-XP/Vista box, which, according to the NBC webpage, shouldn't even have been able to run it.
So kudos to Microsoft and NBC for the implementation. Other people may have had problems, but I wasn't one of them. - nickpick, on 09/06/2008, -4/+17Watching video steams on either platform is awfully annoying. They´re both performance hags.
- Farmer77, on 09/06/2008, -3/+16I watched the Olympic Events that weren't shown on TV using Silverlight without a hitch. And all the videos are still up on the NBC Olympic site right now. Seems this hate for Silverlight is about siding with brand loyalty more than anything else. And if that turns out to be the case, then that's pretty ***** lame.
- djgreedo, on 09/06/2008, -2/+15*****, I thought you were serious up until the [Buffering]...nice.
- inactive, on 09/06/2008, -13/+26Agreed. This is a step back.
Flash doesn't compare to Silverlight.
Most of the problem people had was that they didn't want to download it, but they downloaded Flash.
And I don't see how microsoft should be responsible for Linux support.
And in any case, Silverlight for Linux:
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight - jazzbeaux, on 09/06/2008, -5/+19Interesting how so-called reporters use words that conotate an action that didn't really occur, just to promote their own agenda--like this valleywag creature has done.
NBC did not "dump" Silverlight; the Silverlight content delivery contract was for the Olympics ONLY. The NFL is a totally different contract developed by a totally dfferent company. NBC has, in fact, plans to use Silverlight technology for future events and possible tv show delivery.
Sorry to burst so many Adobe fanboy bubbles; Flash is the equivalent of REALPlayer...outdated and bloated ***** that is past it's use-by date. - jron, on 09/06/2008, -2/+15flash for linux blows. adobe literally has one guy hacking together the linux ports. with silverlight, the more than capable mono team can release an open source version that might actually work. ms has already given the mono team their blessing to continue developing moonlight. flash rapes my browser, doesn't full screen properly, and the audio support is terrible... i'm sick of restarting my browser. to further illustrate how incompetent the adobe team is, compare foxit to adobe's reader. They can't open source their code because they would be laughed at by the entire programming community. that said, much respect to the lone guy working through that mess of code; he has his work cut out for him.
edit. loading up world of warcraft... oh, awesome! no sound because adobe flash doesn't close the audio stream... time to close the browser again! - ncnavguy, on 09/06/2008, -0/+11But 300 million people didn't watch the NFL game.
- arjie, on 09/06/2008, -3/+14Yes, but users not watching are users lost.
- mithrasinvictus, on 09/06/2008, -0/+11I think this deal involved microsoft paying NBC to use silverlight. (to increase the install base)
- benologist, on 09/06/2008, -3/+14To get a general idea on how much it outperforms Flash there's this test:
http://bubblemark.com/silverlight2.html - I get 860 frames per second
http://bubblemark.com/flex.htm - I get 160 frames per second
http://bubblemark.com/flex_bmp.htm - I get 100 frames per second
Then there's my own experimenting. I'm playing around on a diablo-style isometric game engine cause that'd just kick ass in a browser. Early on I ported what I'd done in Silverlight to AS3. Loading just under 2mb of XML holding a very simple dataset for a map took an unnoticable amount of time in Silverlight and completely brought Flash to it's knees for 3 or 4 minutes.
A while back I was working with Flash and a 26mb dataset, it required an insane amount of massaging to process. I had to literally setTimeout my way through each row of data to get it to work. - ricksite, on 09/06/2008, -3/+13Silverlight 2 isn't supported on PowerPC Macs. There is a very large installed base of PPC Macs.
- martalli, on 09/06/2008, -1/+11Moonlight...didn't work with the NBC Olympics feed.
- mithrasinvictus, on 09/06/2008, -10/+19For now.
Why do you think microsoft developed silverlight? Just to piss off adobe or as future leverage for their OS? As soon as they think the time is right their next windows version will have some patented copyrighted mechanism that silverlight will just happen to depend on. - mikelieman, on 09/06/2008, -2/+11Get back to me when I can install Silverlight on my computer.
- WiseWeasel, on 09/06/2008, -8/+16Maybe that's because a lot of people actually tried to watch this, in sharp contrast with their Olympics coverage...
- inactive, on 09/05/2008, -14/+22Hah. Take that, scoundrel!
- mithrasinvictus, on 09/06/2008, -2/+10It does, but not as much as it used to (no version 8 at all) and not as much as silverlight will suck on anything but windows in the future.
Expect to see increased dependence on patented OS specific hardware tricks as silverlight becomes more mainstream. - inactive, on 09/06/2008, -15/+23Well done,I uninstalled that ***** thing the moment olympics were over.
- hokeywhiteboy, on 09/06/2008, -6/+13They did not dump it at all... it is still in Beta, and the Olympic people BEGGED them for use of the technology so they rushed together a totally custom version of it just for the games. I can't speak for everyone who used it... but I can tell you that it was considered a MASSIVE success.
As soon as it goes to production, they will be using it again. - mrbutter, on 09/06/2008, -6/+13u guys are so dumb.
Read the article. - Spoomeister, on 09/06/2008, -2/+9Buried as inaccurate.
- The silverlight deal was only for the Olympics, there was no "dumping".
- Silverlight worked for the Olympics, and has worked for things like convention coverage, much better than Adobe for the NFL. - jellygraph, on 09/06/2008, -1/+9Dear NBC,
I'm an idiot and I have no friends because I keep calling everyone a tard. The only thing that helps me through the day is a Windows Vista Ultimate (ultimate!) box and a tube sock. Also, I have to admit, despite the fact that _everyone_ else on the internet uses Flash to stream video, I'm quite impressed with the fact that you had the guts to do something so stupid. I do things like that all the time!
Kind regards,
djgreedo
Is that about right? - Randy08, on 09/06/2008, -0/+6I can't digg you up enough.
I miss those days! -
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