Editor’s Note: This is an opinion piece, what I am saying is just an opinion, it may not be backed up or have all the facts, you decide for yourself.. I invite all parties involved for comment. I will publish any official comments from any parties directly involved..
Well I am surprised to be writing this, but it’s an important subject and it must be addressed… Note: this is simply my own personal opinion, I’d like to know the facts of the matter and I invite Adobe, Apple, and YouTube to comment on these happenings..
Protectionism and Web Video
It’s more than typical a company says “yeah we are open and support open standards”, when really they mean as long as the competitor doesn’t offer the same ability.. Is this the case here? You decide for yourself..
Silverlight 3 was released and in all of it’s goodness it now supports H.264 video. Many developers in the Silverlight community jumped on this and soon we had a number of new capabilities right out of the gate.. The first one was this nice “Coverflow clone” for the web found and released on Codeplex.com… It let you in a “coverflow” style environment view Apple’s trailers in Silverlight in HD, arguably with smoother streaming and better performance than it currently can in Apple’s own Quicktime…
http://silverlightcoverflow.codeplex.com/
Now all of the sudden a week later we get what you see below…
Coincidence I think not!!!
Next case scenario: YouTube!! An explanation of how to play YouTube! This time with H.264 on an Adobe site..
Let there be no mistake, there was video in these players earlier in the week until word got around the internet that you could do this with Silverlight 3..
While folks may deny that it’s purposefully happening or they have “changed the format to better serve customers”, it’s just amazing that by coincidence that these things are happening just after Silverlight with H.264 video hits the web that suddenly these things don’t work.. I consider this a very proprietary and knee jerk reaction to the situation.. Talk about Microsoft doing practices that aren’t fair to the market, do you think this is being fair and open either??
I would remind everyone that nothing about H.264 is proprietary…
I would love to see further comment from both Adobe, YouTube, and Apple on this issue.. I would be glad to further publish anything they may have to say about this in whole, as to me it seems like this is a purposeful attempt at restricting users of Silverlight from their own content..
Further more, you aren’t open if you move away from H.264 just because your competitor now has it, and it actually may (in some customers opinions) look better when viewed on your competitor’s plug-in..
Is Apple and Adobe afraid of losing out to Silverlight version 3? My guess is sure they are, and this just proves Silverlight is better because they may not want others to see the difference so they are shutting it down from happening, purposefully or not that’s the effect..
All parties are invited to comment officially..