A March Madness Win for Microsoft: CBS Taps Silverlight
by Peter Kafka
Posted on February 17, 2009 at 5:04 AM PT
Do you love college basketball but hate Microsoft? Then CBS has a tough choice in store for you next month.
That’s because the network will be delivering its March Madness coverage using Redmond’s Silverlight streaming media technology, which for some reason stirs apoplectic emotions among a subset of tech zealots. Supposedly these folks would rather look at a blank screen than use dreaded Microsoft (MSFT) tech.
Why? Got me. I downloaded Silverlight onto my MacBook to watch NBC’s Olympics Webcasts last summer. And whenever I could find the events I wanted to watch (much harder than it should have been), I got a really great picture on my laptop.
So did some 40 million other people, which was why Microsoft wanted so desperately to get the rights to the event–it is trying very hard to gain some ground on rival Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash technology, the de facto standard for Web video. So it spends a lot of time focusing on big Web video events where it can introduce its tech to consumers.
[UPDATE: CBS wants you to know -- see comment below -- that you don't have to use Silverlight to watch the games online.]
March Madness isn’t nearly as big as the Olympics, of course: Last year, some 4.8 million people watched the tournament via CBS’s Webcast. But it’s a very big deal for CBS (CBS), which generated more than $20 million in extra advertising revenue out of the event. No word on what Microsoft had to pony up in order to get the rights this year, but Les Moonves and company certainly didn’t give them away.
Comments
Credibility is a terrible thing to waste.
A Microsoft VP the other day was asked weren’t they worried about the fact that their new service “MyPhone” sounded an awful lot like “iPhone”. His response was reported to be along the lines of “We hadn’t noticed the similarity in names.”
Does that seem credible to you? It doesn’t to me, even though I think they have a right to call the product just about anything they want to.
The company’s propensity for prevarication is legend.
Microsoft vends almost no products that work outside the Windows environment and while this is quite intentional and has almost no downside for traditional software, it’s a killer (or at least a maimer) for Internet products. Windows-only audio and video formats have largely given way to more standards based equivalents.
Gradually content producers have started to “get it” that if you use a non-Microsoft standard, Microsoft will work to make sure that Windows is compatible. But if you adopt a Windows based standard they either don’t cooperate or even place stumbling blocks in the way of wider adoption (by competing web browsers, competing servers, etc.) This all has to do with Windows lock-in of course. Microsoft’s motives have never been hard to fathom even when their press releases have.
.NET is a good example of Microsoft taking a half-hearted approach to standards. I suspect Silverlight will take a similar path.
.NET has been out, what, since last century I think? Microsoft published a standard from which you could theoretically write your own implementation. A group of Linux developers have been working on such a thing ever since and as far as I know haven’t produced much beyond primitive demos of the capability.
Compare that with Sun, Real, and Adobe, all of whom have been bad actors in one way or another, but all of them actually distributed code for the standards based products they were trying to promote. Sun provided a Java for Windows (Microsoft produced one that worked better on Windows, but for a long time it was the Sun code that allowed programs to run) and a Java for Linux, Real, as far as I know has always produced Mac compatible and Linux compatible players for their products, as has Adobe for Flash, Adobe Reader, and other things. In all those cases they could have simply produced a “standard” and pronounced it “open”.
Certainly nobody can claim with a straight face that Microsoft doesn’t have the resources to provide .NET and Silverlight for everything from Linux to the iPhone, but as a career monopolists, they don’t see the need to.
Expect such an attitude to get the reception it deserves.
Posted by Mac Beach at February 17th, 2009 at 9:14 amI just wanted to post a note regarding NCAA March Madness on Demand adding the Silverlight high-quality video player.
I want to make sure it’s clear that users simply have the OPTION to view the enhanced stream through the Silverlight player. If they choose not to download the Silverlight player – no problem – they can still watch via our standard player (Windows Media) which millions of fans (4.8 million in 2008) have used over the years (MMOD started in 2003) to enjoy the tournament.
I should also add that if users access NCAA March Madness on Demand through the CBS Audience Network, they will view the standard video through Flash.
Either way, just about everyone should be covered and able to enjoy every game of the tournament, straight through the Final Four and Championship.
CBSSports.com is the first media company to broadcast a major sports event live and in its entirety for free on the Internet. We are also now the first to give fans the OPTION to watch it on the Internet in a high-quality stream.
Alex Riethmiller
CBSSports.com Communications
Posted by Alex Riethmiller at February 17th, 2009 at 3:47 pm