Silverlight to follow Obama into US presidency

Change you can watch

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Applications, 17th January 2009 04:09 GMT

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Barack Obama's inauguration as US president next week will be broadcast online using Microsoft's Silverlight browser-based media player.

Microsoft said Friday that Obama's Presidential Inaugural Committee had selected Silverlight to stream live coverage of his swearing-in from its site, scheduled for Tuesday in Washington DC.

It's the second Obama outing for Silverlight. Obama's speech accepting his party's nomination as candidate for US president was streamed via Silverlight from the Democratic National Convention last August.

And this is the third high-profile win for Silverlight, which last year streamed online coverage of the Olympics for US broadcasting giant NBC.

Microsoft is just the latest tech vendor to hitch a ride on Obama's coattails. Salesforce.com this week apparently got clearance from Obama's PR people to announce that Salesforce CRM Ideas is being used by Obama's Change.gov site to gather ideas from US citizens on policy.

Number one on the idea list: Pass the joint, yo.

Sun Microsystems chief executive Jonathan Schwartz struck first, though. Blogging shortly after Obama's victory was announced in November, he said that BarackObama.com had used Sun's MySQL as its database platform. ®

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