Much has been made of Silverlight getting into the RIA space mainly so that Microsoft would have some tool to make themselves a player again in web based video space. As Scoble said,

Perhaps the hottest debate in my circle today centers around the technologies we’ll use inside, or outside, the browser to build a new kind of rich Internet application. We’re talking mostly about video, because that’s where the action is, …

What makes news is when a major player - like Major League Baseball or Netflix - picks Silverlight to deliver video. The perception becomes that not only is Silverlight a contender but maybe Flash is in trouble.

But the perception is misleading. Because someone like Netflix might use Silverlight we perceive it as a major victory. But in reality, Netflix is only one source of video content. How much would Adobe had made if Netflix had chosen Flash? A few dozen copies of the Flash authoring tool at best. It’s a drop in the ocean.

The ocean of designers and developers who make video content for the web is huge. Take youTube, all the major news channels, entertainment channels, basically every brand name you can think of with a web video presence. Add them all up and how much of the total volume of developers and designers in the world do you think they represent? I’m sure it’s a fleetingly small percentage whatever it may be.

On the other hand think of all the freelancers, design firms big and small, and IT departments that you’ve never heard of. That group comprises the vast majority of boxes of CS3 sold. That’s where the money is.

I’m not saying that the big companies that we hear about don’t matter. Of course they do. But they don’t have the impact we might think at first glance. By far their biggest impact is the influence they have on others to follow their lead do to a mis perception of their importance.

So how many of those small bands of designers/developers do you think are going to jump on the Silverlight bandwagon and start publishing video to the web?

A few percent? At best.

Anyone who has already used Flash to deliver video already knows how easy it is. And if they’ve used video.Maru they know how powerful and simple it is.

Contrast that with Silverlight and you end up with a lot of questions. Have you deployed a web based video with Silverlight? Do you know anyone who has? What’s the workflow like? How do you do it?

By the time you answer those questions you could already have a functional video interface in Flash ready to deploy.