Microsoft Says Silverlight 2 Now On 100 Million PCs, Gives Details On Silverlight 3

Last night, Scott Guthrie at Microsoft posted more details on his blog about the adoption of Silverlight 2 and gave some details on new features in Silverlight 3, slated to be released next year. While I had previously heard Microsoft say 1 in 4 machines on the Internet has some form of the Silverlight player installed, this is the first time I have seen the 100 million number for consumer machines mentioned. And since that number does not include installs in the enterprise, the total number of machines that have the Silverlight player are even higher.

While 100 million sounds like a big number, many will want to compare that to the number of Flash installs that Adobe has and say that it's still small. But right now, it's still too early to compare the two. Silverlight is still new in the market and we need to wait and see what kind of growth and penetration rate Silverlight gets over the next 12-18 months before you can really compare Silverlight to Flash. As I have said in the past, Microsoft is in this platform fight for the long term and can spend the time growing their share of the market strategically and steadily. They don't need to surge ahead overnight and they have the ability to compete with Flash over time. Microsoft knows this is a race that will be won year's from now and they have time on their side.

In addition to Scott's post listing many of the new features in Silverlight 2,he also briefly talks about some of the new features coming next year in Silverlight 3 including support for H.264, 3D and GPU hardware acceleration, richer data-binding and support for additional controls.

When Microsoft releases Silverlight 3 next year, adds support for H.264 and we see video services like those from Netflix gain traction, the online video format market is really going to heat up. I'm not making any bets on who's going to eventually win, but I will say that I don't think there is ever going to be a single format the dominates the market. I think we will also have more than one major player in the format space and considering how many different kinds of video solutions are needed in the market, there is room for two major players.

Comments

[Tim Siglin]

Interestingly, Adobe claimed at today's MAX keynote that it now has 81% of all the world's video streams delivered by Flash, citing ComScore. In a briefing afterwards, they claimed a rise from 66-81% over a twelve-month period with Microsoft simultaneously declining from 24-12% in the same period.

While beauty (or in this case format adoption) is subjective, if nothing else, the war of words, claims and counterclaims will continue for some time.

[Audrey]

Hi Dan, What happended with the LIVE Olympic streaming buzz with Silverlight? Do you have any data from NBC Live streaming success?

How come Silverlight was nowhere to be find during the U.S. Election 2008? Any feedback for us? Cheers.

[Dan Rayburn]

Hi Audrey, NBC put out a lot of data on the Olympics such as: http://blog.llnw.com/2008/08/nbcolympicscom-update-august-22nd/

As for data from Microsoft about the Olympics and the volume of downloads they saw with Silverlight, they have not put out any data on that.

I saw quite a few election related videos, on-demand, in Silverlight, but the live DNC stream was done with Move Networks and I know MSNBC and CNN did their live streaming in Flash.

[Abhinav]

MLB dropping support for Silverlight and moving back to Flash may also be an indicator of the struggles that Silverlight will have to go through to get the adoption they need.. goes with Adobe claims of the decline of Silverlight adoption:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10098963-93.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

[Christopher Levy]

Audrey maybe you missed the Democratic Convention Online?

The real issue for Adobe is going to be the missing DRM technology they desperately need to advance.

MLB will suffer from a huge amount of recording of their content which they will not be able to stop.