Web Directions

Flash, Silverlight, and other embedded content

With both Microsoft and Adobe putting con­sid­er­able energy into their respec­tive mul­ti­me­dia for­mats, Silverlight and Flash, and the rise of web based video, dri­ven in part by the pop­u­lar­ity of YouTube, as well as the increas­ing adop­tion of Broadband around the world, we wanted to get a sense of the extent to which devel­op­ers were using this kind of con­tent, how they were using it, and what for­mats they were using.

We first asked “Do you incor­po­rate media into your sites that requires browser plu­g­ins to play?”. Around two thirds of respon­dents answered yes, and a lit­tle under one third no. The num­ber incor­po­rat­ing such con­tent was higher than we had anticipated.

We then asked of those who answered yes which for­mats they use. Unsurprisingly, given how long it has been avail­able, Flash leads with 61% of respon­dents. More sur­pris­ing was Silverlight’s very small mar­ket share of a lit­tle over 2%, essen­tially the same as that of the Real for­mat. Quicktime did sur­pris­ingly well, at just under 20%.

We also asked what other for­mats respon­dents used. Only 3 replied Java, demon­strat­ing how mar­gin­al­ized that lan­guage has become for web based con­tent and appli­ca­tions. 4 men­tioned the MP3 for­mat, but very lit­tle else was mentioned.

As impor­tant as the for­mats that respon­dents are using, is the uses to which they are putting this con­tent. To this end, we asked “What do you use this kind of con­tent for?”

• Just under 60% said Video
• 40% said audio (respon­dents could choose more than one option)
• 22% said “Embedded games and other inter­ac­tive applications”
• Only 7% said “whole sites” (which is still higher than might be expected)

It’s clear that on the whole, these plug-​​in tech­nolo­gies are beings used pre­dom­i­nantly for audio and video con­tent, and to a lesser extent to add richer inter­ac­tion to sites. It will be inter­est­ing to see with the increas­ing sophis­ti­ca­tion of JavaScript libraries, and per­for­mance of JavaScript in the browser, whether these tech­nolo­gies hold their own against JavaScript based solu­tions in future, out­side the areas of video and audio.

Next

Next, in our final sec­tion, we’ll take a look at the server side tech­nolo­gies respon­dents use.