Silverlight Live Streaming being discontinued. What now?
The Microsoft Live team announced in a blog
post that the Silverlight Streaming service is being discontinued.
The Silverlight Streaming service offered free hosting for Silverlight
applications and videos.The blog post states:
"Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live Beta is being discontinued and will eventually be taken down.Further they write:
A new Windows® Azure(TM)-based hosting and delivery service will be launched by the end of 2009, though this is not a direct replacement for Silverlight Streaming and will have costs associated with its use."
"Don't panic! All your current content is safe and you will receive sufficient notice for you to make an informed decision on where to host your Silverlight content and applications. However, in the interim, we would like you to be aware of the following:
Effective immediately, no new sign-ups are permitted for the Silverlight Streaming service. In addition, the Silverlight Streaming publishing plug-in for Expression Encoder will no longer be available for download.
The new Windows Azure functionality will not be a direct replacement for the Silverlight Streaming service and will be a paid subscription service."
The blog post also gives some instructions
on how to retrieve the hosted Silverlight content. One can't really say
that the offered (Azure) "migration process" is comfortable and
frictionless. Actually, as far as I know there is no real Azure
migration service at the moment, one can only access the Silverlight
Streaming file system and copy the content.
What now?
In my opinion this is not a very nice move of Microsoft for bloggers
like me. I have used Silverlight Streaming to provide live examples for
my Silverlight posts. I mainly blog about Silverlight development and
provide content and source code for free, therefore I help Microsoft to
spread their technology - for free. It's a shame that a free streaming
service at least for personal / educational purposes like mine isn't
offered anymore. I might see things too naive and got the intention of
Silverlight Streaming wrong, but from my point of view it's definitely
not nice.
For now I have uploaded the samples and Videos to my public Dropbox folder and stream them
from there. Timothy Parez (@delegatevoid)
pointed
me on this alternative and it actually works fine. Thanks Timothy!
I hope this blog
post from the Silverlight Streaming team does not reflect the final
decisions for Microsoft's Silverlight hosting. At least I can hope...
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