Flash Platform evangelist Andrew Shorten has an interesting post about UK’s largest commercial broadcaster replacing their Silverlight player platform with Flash.
He shares some thoughts about the reasoning behind the decision:
“ITV, owner of the UK’s largest commercial television channel in terms of audience share and advertising revenue, had been using Silverlight since the launch of the service, but if the ITV forums and other reports are anything to go by, the use of Silverlight had certainly caused frustration for many visitors to the site trying to use ITV Player.
I have no inside knowledge as to what caused ITV to walk away from Microsoft’s technology and instead use Flash Player to stream programmes such as Coronation Street, Emmerdale and X Factor on the ITV Player; it seems though that a combination of the reported technical problems experienced by end-users and the relatively low distribution of the the runtime, which required most visitors to install Silverlight, proved to be too much of a barrier for end-user adoption, especially when compared with the successful use of Flash for BBC iPlayer, 4 on-demand and Five TV’s Demand 5 service.”
I have flash and silverlight but itcv has stopped working. It keeps telling me to insall adobe flash but i already have several times…even removing all traces of the old one. Why did they switch from SIlverlight – i had no problems but now i do. :*(
What browser / OS are you on?