Ever tried watching a popular sporting event online only to be disappointed at the poor quality?  Well this year CBS will be streaming the NCAA Men’s Basketball March Madness Tournament with Microsoft Silverlight. With the Silverlight player, CBS will be able to send streams of up to 1.5 mpbs to millions at home (or at work) watching!  For those that think this is just a publicity stunt, please remember that last year the NCAA March Madness On Demand had 4.8 million viewers and generated $23 million in advertising revenue.

In previous years CBS had to build “waiting rooms” for people that were too late to in line to watch the games.  This year will be very different.  With Facebook integration, expect this viewing experience to be unlike any other you have experienced to date.

Silverlight has been gaining ground in the last year, despite some comments from Adobe that Silverlight has “fizzled”.  There are now over 100 million installations of Silverlight.  Some high profile events have been brought to you exclusively via Silverlight.  Obama’s Inauguration, Olympics in Beijing, and many other sporting events.  However, where Silverlight will truly take off is when business’s start to realize that the User Interface is an integral aspect of what makes software successful.  Since I can remember, businesses around the world have mainly focused on the “back-end” to software applications.  The User Interface and User Experience has always been an afterthought.  Is it a surprise that nearly 80% of Software Development projects can be considered failures?

When businesses realize that the User Experience is important enough to have talented designers and user experience experts work on them instead of your typical software developer, you will see technologies that enable the imagination to run wild take over.  Buildings don’t use the same architect that designs structure and support, to design the aesthetics of a building.  That would be disastrous.  Why then do we expect software developers that don’t like design, to design user interfaces?  You either need UX experts, or you need your developers to become UX experts.  And they will need new technologies to make their ideas reality!

These technologies include Silverlight, WPF, and other Adobe competitors.  But when it comes to business applications, Microsoft tends to have the edge.  In the next few years Flash will become more of a web toy and Silverlight will become a real development platform.  That’s my prediction anyway.