Silverlight gets an upgrade tomorrow, with Microsoft hoping its content delivery system can start to gain ground on Adobe's all-conquering Flash software.
Silverlight 2.0 boasts changes across the board, including powerful new built-in controls, advanced skinning and template for customisation and - shudder - Silverlight DRM content protection based on Microsoft's PlayReady for mobile devices.
Deep Zoom, for example, makes navigating and examining high resolution images much smoother and faster.
There are also a host of new networking and developer tools (including some open source resources) to make it easier for third party companies to create applications.
Silver-tongued techy
"We launched Silverlight just over a year ago, and already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight installed," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft.
Microsoft claims that Silverlight penetration in "some countries" is as high as 50%. The USA, for instance, saw a 30% bump in Silverlight uptake during the Olympics, thanks NBC's website serving 70 million video streams and 600 million minutes of video.
Microsoft is well aware that consumers don't really care what mechanism they use to access their content and is actively targeting big business to drive Silverlight's growth. It reports that CBS, Blockbuster, Hard Rock Cafe, Yahoo! Japan, AOL and Toyota are all working on significant Silverlight portals.
Anyone already using a previous version of Silverlight will be automatically upgraded to Silverlight 2, possibly by the light of the silvery moon, sometime Tuesday.
The new software includes support for Mac, Windows and Linux in Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, as well as Chrome (on PC at least).
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dgerard
October 19th 2008
1. Microsoft today announced the release of version 2.0 its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform for the Web. As a replacement for Adobe's Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found.
"We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight," announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. "NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Convention, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. My resumé's a car crash, Google won't call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I'm the walking dead, man. The walking dead."
Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 96% of all computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures.
"But it's got DRM!" cried Guthrie. "Netflix loved it! And web developers love us too, after all we did for them with IE 6. Wait, come back! We'll put p*rn on it! Free p*rn!"
Similar Microsoft initiatives include its XPS replacement for Adobe PDF, its HD Photo replacement for JPEG photographs and its earlier Liquid Motion attempt to replace Flash. Also, that CD-ROM format Vista defaults to which no other computers can read.
In a Microsoft internal security sweep, Guthrie's own desktop was found to still be running Windows XP.
(My blog rant: <a href="http://tinyurl.com/6rxgnd">http://tinyurl.com/6rxgnd</a> )
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