Go check it! http://www.onlinespotlight.no/en/Christmas07/
It’s real progress. What you are viewing is a piece of content being played and rendered in a Microsoft player and you can interact with it. Imagine that! So I figured out that I was watching Jackass 2.5 on my PC/TV using a MS Silverlight player. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the new Microsoft Media Player has been renamed Silverlight. Who thinks of these names?
Silverlight brings, among other things, interactivity to streamed video content in a web page and in a PC environment. This is great, because, in addition to getting the comfort of Microsoft’s DRM and content distribution solutions, content owners can now use the interactive and advertisement insertion capabilities present in Silverlight to increase the monetisation possibilities of their content when distributing online. They won’t have to worry about whether the content distribution site or company is using this format, or that format, or is only Adobe Flash-based (we’ll talk about AMP later) or is Windows based. It’s about time, with due apologies to Divx, Real, and others that the three biggies, Quicktime, Flash AND Windows players all support interactivity and relatively dynamic and complex ad insertion, playback and tracking/reporting.
Our Ad Management Service already supports a few dozen (OK, that’s an exaggeration of sorts), players and formats, and adding support for this is in the product queue, but once it’s in, we’ll be able to provide the same reporting, tracking and ROI capabilities we currently do on FLV/SWF and .MOV content on .WMV and VC1 content. And that’ll be a relief. I’m getting tired of asking after whether content owners distribute content in this format or that. They shouldn’t care, as long the player and distribution system is safe, and they can monetise it, they’ll be happy.
Jayant Kadambi
