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CNN drops Windows Media for Flash in redesigned website
By Mack Male | July 1, 2007 at 6:59 pm
CNN officially launched their new, redesigned website today. The site, which has been in beta for a few weeks, includes many “web 2.0″ features like user generated content, podcasts, and a clean, simple layout. For a great overview of the new site, check out Read/WriteWeb.
Video (and multimedia in general) is a major feature of the new site. In the past CNN has been a major user of Windows Media formats, but that has changed with the redesign. All videos are now encoded to Flash (FLV) meaning you no longer need to have Windows Media Player installed to view them.
In fact, the only feature I can see that still uses Windows Media is the radio stream. The site says Live Video is coming soon, and that may use Windows Media as well. Otherwise, everything is either Flash or MP3/M4V (podcasts).
All video content at CNN.com is free, so they have no need for DRM. Thus, it makes sense to move from Windows Media to Flash, as more users/computers have Flash installed than Windows Media Player.
This seems to be a growing trend - moving video content to Flash. Call it the YouTube effect I guess. I wonder if Silverlight will do anything to stop this? Windows Media and the other codecs that Silverlight support offer much higher quality than Flash.
Time will tell!
Tags: cnn, flash, Silverlight, windows media
Topics: Codecs, Silverlight, Windows Media Player |
July 29th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Trouble is Windows Media and Silverlight aren’t cross-platform. You can view Flash video on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux with no problem. But to view Windows Media on those platforms requires ugly hacks.
This is the problem when the owner of a video format also owns an operating system. Conflict of interest supporting other operating systems. Open formats are the way to go.