A while ago I promised to build a Silverlight app in the first quarter, whilst that didn’t happen we’ve finally built our first ninemsn site using Silverlight, the National Nine News 6pm Bulletin.

From 6pm every night we’ll be live streaming the news for Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane locations. You can choose to view the stream in either Silverlight or Windows Media Player (from those who can’t or won’t install the plug-in).

Along with the stream we’ve selected stories that match the bulletin so you can get more detailed information about the topic.

A lot of infrastructure changes have gone on in the background including upgrading Channel nine and Hostworks environment. We’ve also done a bit of testing the 640px wide screen works well at a bit rate the same as our standard 320px video player.

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Out of interest, from the soft-launch stats 55% of people have chosen the Silverlight player which is a great result for the technology considering our non-technical user base.

Well it’s not quite a reality yet, but check out Shane and Michael play with Silverlight using the ninemsn homepage.

http://blogs.msdn.com/shanemo/archive/2008/03/02/shanemo-and-delicategenius-do-artists-in-residence.aspx

Just when we were all pondering if the great technology behind Silverlight was going to die before it had begun, Billy Gates pulls another rabbit out of the bag.

For those who don’t know, Microsoft have teamed up again with NBC to build the Olympics site.

To see Bill’s presentation check out http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx
(click on one of the CES streams, NBC Olympics details begin at 35 minutes 50 seconds)

This really is a masterstroke and couldn’t be better timed. Silverlight 2.0 will have already been released along with the developer tools and it’ll have a little time to mature (or release patches at least). People will be willing to make the all important plugin download due to it being the Olympics and well, you can hardly get any better content to show off your wares.

Looks like I’m going to have to keep up my New Years resolution and build that Silverlight app, before NBC do!

** Fingers crossed, they do a really good implementation **

Microsoft have finally started to work out version numbers, so Silverlight 1.1 will now be Silverlight2.0 

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/11/29/silverlight-1-1-is-now-silverlight-2-0.aspx 

Maybe they should correct past mistakes and revert .Net 3.0 back to 2.1?