Silverlight for the masses, is it time

Question

We are launching a site that is media heavy and looking at using silverlight, since most of our video library is in wmv and from what i understand flash serving still costs a couple bucks.

Is silverlight really adopted out there, I know i use it as well as a bunch of developers for internal apps but as far as a web application is it ready to go, i went through a mac install with safari and had to restart my whole browser to install it, not exactly a great user experience. I also noticed that MS doesnt even use it for http://video.msn.com and also the few sites that have launched get crazy MAC people crying bloody murder , read http://www.itwriting.com/blog/641-mac-users-refusing-to-install-silverlight.html where one New York Times reader said "Nope. Not going to use anything from Microsoft. If reading the NYT requires MS products then, for this reader, goodbye NYT." when asked to install silverlight for NYT site. Tech wise moving forward I like Silverlight and some of the things i can do from a framework / wpf perspective and want to move ahead with it just not sure it's the out there enough yet. Just wondering what people think out there

Answer 1

I think that if you have a user base that refuses to upgrade from Internet Explorer 6, good luck with getting anything else adopted, including Silverlight.

The thing can be installed more or less automatically just like Flash, for crying out loud. How difficult could it be?

The argument up to now has been, "Flash is already installed on most computers, so it already has high adoption." But that's a chicken and egg problem. How did Flash get adopted in the first place?

The NYT reader just has a prejudice. Clearly he believes that Microsoft is the evil empire. There's really nothing you can do about that. The real question is, how prevalent is this attitude? Certainly it will be common among the Linux/open source crowd, but it's hard for me to believe that this attitude would be prevalent among the average user. If anything, the Microsoft name is a warm and fuzzy for them.