Microsoft has jumped into the viral video market with Soapbox. What’s interesting to me is that they are using both Flash video and Windows Media Player depending on the users capabilities. It seems that FireFox and Mac users get Flash and Windows/IE users get WMP.

This post by Kurt Shintaku - Account Technology Strategist - makes a good argument for using WMP where possible and the degrading “to the lowest common denominator” for everyone else.

First off, it’s hard to call Flash video the lowest common denominator in the same sentence that has WMP. There is no doubt that the WMP 9 codec is by all accounts very good at what it does well but it pretty much blows chunks for web based video. Case in point: my manager checked out the site on his XP with WMP 11 and promptly crashed IE. So, great codec, lousy player.

Bottom line: for web based video Flash is the highest commen denominator.