Qumu Takes Silverlight Behind the Firewall

Written by Ryan Lawler

Monday, May 11. 2009 at 11:20 AM EDT 1 comment

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Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) may have found a way to increase enterprise adoption of Silverlight, with a new plug-in from Web conferencing firm Qumu that will allow companies to use the rich Internet application (RIA) platform for multicast video.

The new Multicast plug-in for Silverlight, which was jointly developed by Microsoft and Qumu, will allow corporations to deliver live Webcasts in a multicast format. By doing so, enterprises can reduce the traffic that is delivered over the corporate network.

"In a live broadcast environment, a unicast stream will flood corporate networks, so typically they want to rely on multicast," says Qumu vice president of marketing Scott Safe.

Multicast delivery is one reason why Microsoft's Windows Media player is still the de facto standard for corporate video broadcasts behind the firewall, as neither Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE)'s Flash nor Microsoft Silverlight supported multicast broadcasting.

But the new plug-in will allow corporations to deliver multicast streams based on the same streaming infrastructure used for Windows Media broadcasts, but now deliver them to the Microsoft Silverlight environment.

The availability to do multicast streaming could help spur adoption of Silverlight in the enterprise environment, where penetration of the Microsoft platform lags that of Adobe Flash. Due to years of being bundled with the Windows operating system, Flash is pervasive on enterprise desktops today. Due to its relatively recent release, Silverlight does not have nearly the same enterprise penetration.

One other issue is that users need administrative rights to install Silverlight, meaning that for many corporate users, it's up to IT departments to make Silverlight available. Some IT departments may balk at the installation of Silverlight -- but multicast streaming may give them a good reason to install the plug-in.

"What organizations need is a good reason to install Silverlight, and one of most compelling reasons for enterprises to do so is to enable multicast streaming," Safe says.

While Qumu has enabled the plug-in for use by its own enterprise video customers, including Raytheon and Polycom, the company has also made it available on Codeplex, Microsoft's repository for open-source projects. As a result, developers can use the plug-in to build their own Silverlight players that can support multicast events.