Microsoft’s Silverlight technology has been chosen to stream U.S. President-elect Barack Obama’s swearing-in ceremony live on the Presidential Inaugural Committee’s Web site , Microsoft said last Friday.
Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden are due to be sworn in and deliver inauguration speeches Tuesday January 20 th in Washington, D.C. Both events will be streamed live on the PIC site using Silverlight, a cross-browser technology for delivering live and on-demand video over the Web.
The PIC will also stream video of an event with Obama and Biden in Baltimore on Saturday as part of their “Whistle Stop Tour,” which will take them from Philadelphia to Washington for the inaugural ceremony and celebrations.
The inaugural event is the latest high-profile use of Silverlight, which was first released in April 2007 as a rival to Adobe Flash. The technology comprises a tool for developing and designing Internet applications and a media player for delivering content.
It wasn’t until the release of Silverlight 2 in October, however, that the technology became a viable alternative to Flash for building rich Internet applications.
While Silverlight 2 was in beta in August, the 2008 Democratic National Convention Committee used it to stream proceedings from the convention, including Obama’s acceptance speech to more than 80,000 people at an outdoor stadium in Denver.
Microsoft also teamed up with U.S. television network NBC that month to deliver thousands of hours of both live and on-demand coverage from the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.
This is the 3 rd high profile win for Silverlight. If you don’t already have Silverlight installed just click the following link and you’ll be able to watch all the festivities.
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx
http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/
Bad news for Mac, Linux or FreeBSD users – there’s no compatible application available for these systems so I guess you’ll just have to watch this history making event the old fashioned way – on TV
