Anyone who's spent any time working on Digital Signage will know two things about the Flash format.  1: it's perfect for digital signage and 2: It sucks. Don't get me wrong; Flash is a great medium for what it was desgined for (small animated graphics) but it has some serious drawbacks. 

Abysmal Performance...

First and foremost of these is the actual technical architecture of the Flash display engine.  Flash works great in a small window but scale it up to full screen and the performance can be utterly abysmal.  A flash file with large bitmaps and some groovy fading effects etc will bring the most powerful machines to it's knees.  CPU usage for flash increases exponentially when you increase the size of the canvas.  It just wasn't designed to go fulll screen.  The most surprising thing is, is that Macromedia/Adobe have had a good many years to think about this problem but have declined in their wisdom to do something about it.  Just how bad is the problem?  Well, a 500mb HD Video playing full screen uses less CPU than a 50kb Flash file playing full screen.  It's not entirely flash's fault, as the processing load for vector graphics falls on the CPU and not the GPU but still... It has been many years...

Instability

Flash also freezes occasionally and carelessly authored content leaks memory.  The problem for Digital Signage is that leaks are really really really bad news.  Because 99.9999% (or there abouts) of flash files live for 30 seconds in a browser page and do nothing else, its understandable why these bugs haven't been front and center for the developers in the Flash team; but they're heartbreakers for Digital Signage.

Programmability

Flash is programmed using ActionScript.  People have written incredible applications with ActionScript but compared to most modern languages, the development tools are poor, the debugging tools poorer, the language is a little underdeveloped and capabilities for interacting with other system components are severely limited.

Enter the light...
Enter SilverLight, Microsoft's new vector graphics based format.  Or as Microsoft succinctly put it, "Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web."   We aren't 100% certain that the guys in Redmond have nailed these flash problems with SilverLight but we're going to find out soon because...

Ryarc CampaignManager will support SliverLight for Advertising Animation and Kiosk Interactivity

What's really cool about SilverLight is that interactivity and programmability can be done in .net meaning a nice smooth interoperability with existing applications and a much larger talent pool available for the development of interactive content.  Anyway, we'll blog more on this exciting new technology and we expect to offer a version of CampaignManager Digital Signage Software which supports SilverLight in the coming months....

Example of SilverLight in action...