A March Madness Win For Microsoft: CBS Taps Silverlight
Do you love college basketball but hate Microsoft? Then CBS has a tough choice in store for you next month.
That’s because the network will be delivering its March Madness coverage using Redmond’s Silverlight streaming media technology, which for some reason stirs apoplectic emotions among a subset of tech zealots. Supposedly these folks would rather look at a blank screen than use dreaded Microsoft (MSFT) tech.
Why? Got me. I downloaded Silverlight onto my MacBook in order to watch NBC’s Olympics Webcasts last summer. And whenever I could find the events I wanted to watch (much harder than it should have been), I got a really great picture on my laptop.
So did some 40 million other people, which was why Microsoft wanted so desperately to get the rights to the event - it is trying very hard to gain some ground on rival Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash technology, which is the de facto standard for Web video. So it spends a lot of time focusing on big Web video events where it can introduce its tech to consumers.
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