Sharepoint, Silverlight, and Planned Obsolescence.

Sharepoint, somewhat famously, does not give a fuck about bandwidth. It loads slow. Do you already understand about why that might be? Say, you already work in a corporate development environment? This post is perhaps not for you, because you understand: people have paid to make this bad on purpose.

Those of us from a different background may still have this tiny, feckless reserve of non-cynicism in place, however. So! For those of us not in the environment wherein resources are understood to be infinite: Sharepoint famously does not give a fuck about bandwidth.  You can do some things to help, but you can't fix it. Sharepoint is intended for internal corporate use, not external hog-wild link parties, and thus has been engineered to efficiently share documents. Indoors, out of the cold, and specifically overlarge Microsoft documents from the same Office suite as your current Sharepoint build.

This is a challenge, because your company never updates its information tech, and Sharepoint is Microsoft's sherry trifle* of planned obsolescence in web-flavoured software development. So you aren't running the same Office suite across your entire company. You may not be running compatible builds through your whole department. This makes things rather more difficult than MS planning documents will have you believe.
*complex, layered, better with alcohol.

Planned obsolescence is weird. It is designed to force clients to pay a tax to continue running their business, upgrading every two to five years regardless of actual utility improvement. In MajorDevLand, this means your clients are Locked In to Pay You Money every few years. In reality, this is a strong argument for not updating your fleet. Ever. When you update your fleet, you break your ability to do work into people in your company that have resources, and people who do not have resources. When the resources are documents that need to be collaborated on, everyone fails to the lowest common denominator... and it's handy to have that denominator be truly common.

Aside: People are trying to solve this tricky "no-one will give me money all the time" problem with subscription services. They've seen how the famously beloved* phone companies did it and are out for theirs. We shall see how this goes. I imagine well for some, piss-poorly for others.
*not beloved in the slightest.

So: Although Sharepoint theoretically loads Silverlight and can serve photography, videos, and rich media assets, the Sharepoint you're using never will. Although you can brand it, and indeed must brand it, to match your company and avoid Suits Laughing Alone With Salad, you don't need to worry about bandwidth consumption. Shove that shit in an average Sharepoint page and watch your ability to efficiently share and collaborate on documents across your organization squeal to a halt. It will just stop working. Don't support it.