June 12th, 2007
A YouTube Competitor in Silverlight and 1080p Flash Video
Microsoft may be looking to create a competitor to YouTube that would support user uploaded content and 720p video. BigMouthMedia has some quotes from Tim Sneath, the group manager for WPF/Silverlight evangelism at Microsoft about their desire to deliver a new kind of experience for video-sharing.
Rich media is getting a huge jolt and becoming higher and higher quality. Flash helped transform how people view video on the web, but Silverlight raised the bar with the video features in the 1.0 beta. Things like DRM and very high quality are becoming both more important and more prevalent in the consumer rich media space.
With the Flash Player update announcement today, we saw more signs that the web video world is heating up. Tinic Uro from Adobe posted about the availability of 1080p video in the new player:
Multi-threaded video decoding. The VP6 video codec will now run in a separate thread if a multi-core system is detected which leaves the main thread to do rendering and post processing of the video. With this true 1080p video is now possible on most modern dual core machines. Also, the responsiveness is improved with this change. The Sorenson codec on the other hand did not get this change for technical reasons.
It’s an exciting time to be involved in the web video space. Content is getting better and the infrastructures around the solutions are getting more robust. Web video is going to go through some significant improvements soon.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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