Does anyone else think it is kinda funny that Microsoft chose to build the video player for MSNBC in Flash, when they are pitching their Silverlight applet as their new multimedia platform?

Don’t get me wrong, Flash is definitely the way to go for video on the web right now. It’s cross-platform and YouTube helped establish it as the defacto standard. Of course, they didn’t have much choice since there wasn’t really anything out there to compete except a few clunky Java-applet implementations and old-school embedding Windows Media or Quicktime on a page (which never really worked right). But why wouldn’t they go with Silverlight and help with the adoption rate?

Oh well, thanks MSNBC. You’re just leaving the door open for us to be the first major media company to rollout a Silverlight player. And if you think we’re stupid to roll out Silverlight when all the people with it installed in their browser could probably fit in a Yaris, I ask you: do you want to reencode 20,000 videos from Windows Media? I thought so