Re:So what? (Score 5, Informative)

Why'd they choose Silverlight over Flash?

For *live* streaming, I suspect that it's far cheaper to set up a bunch of Windows Media servers than it is to set up a bunch of Flash servers.

Flash Streaming Server licenses are *extremely* expensive. There are open-source alternatives, but so far as I know none of them are very good at handling thousands (or tens of thousands) of simultaneous connections.

Windows Media servers, however, are just regular ol' Windows servers -- couple hundred dollars per box with no user limits, and they do quite well with heavy loads.

Unless Adobe manages to compete better on pricing, or unless some of the open-source alternatives get better at scaling to thousands of users, then I bet we'll see more and more developers pushing Silverlight without Microsoft having to pay them to do anything.

And note that I'm talking about *live* streaming, not streaming prerecorded stuff like YouTube.