A Tale Of Two Streams

I've spent the evening watching rugby online an it's fascinating to note that the BBC, using rtmp, wipes Sky, using Silverlight, off the court. The quality and the buffering were considerably less on the BBC on the same, relatively poor, conection. Indeed, perhaps appropriately, Silverlight looks like an impressionist drawing to me here in Paris, the image is so soft.

It's pretty incredible that one of the most tech savvy companies on earth was taken in by Microsoft's dog of an answer to Flash, a technology that itself has been proven to be hugely flawed and which it had already put out of its misery.

This week we had a client demanding MMS streaming, the old Microsoft streaming protocol, a technology that I last used a decade ago, but apparently there are organisations in the UK still operating on Windows XP!

This is all an issue for Microsoft, who are sitting on a massive but low lying island as the tide comes in. Azure has been a massive failure compared go AWS, LAMP has clobbered .Net, IE is in serious decline. Only its OSes and Office keep Microsoft going.

Microsoft has certainly lost any hope of ever being a serious play in the video and TV markets.