Real-Time Data Update with Silverlight and Web Services

This screencast shows how you can host media assets as part of a Silverlight application on the Silverlight Streaming globally-cached content distribution network.
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Nice. Could not follow all that. But have a few questions:
1) Can all that js be replaced with c#?
2) Do you actually need a streaming server? Can the client just download the video and play it while it is being downloaded?
Tim Sneath wrote:Hi Stacey,
The JavaScript that's included as a remotely-based script is really to instantiate the Silverlight runtime on multiple platforms, as well as to download Silverlight if it's not present on a machine; the one-line of JavaScript that's in CreateSilverlight.js is purely for activating and invoking the runtime. So there's not much point in replacing those lines with C# - it's everything that comes after that which you would write in C#.
You're right - you don't need a streaming server; you could use HTTP progressive download. But the streaming server reduces bandwidth costs becauseyou don't have to host it yourself with Silverlight Streaming; (b) even if you were hosting it, streaming only downloads what you actually watch, as opposed to progressive download which will keep downloading ahead of what you actually need even if you stop viewing the video halfway through. The other advantage of Silverlight Streaming is that it's cached in multiple geographic locations around the world, so viewers in the US, Europe or the Far East will each have a local, responsive solution. This kind of content distribution usually costs a fair amount of money, and we're making it available for free here.
Hope this helps,
Tim