Microsoft has unveiled a new media platform that called Silverlight, with the slogan of “light up the web.” It is a new cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web, according to them. Some industry pundits have questioned whether this release will be a direct competitor to the popular application on the web, i.e. Adobe Flash. According to a source of Wikipedia, the “first” Community Technology Preview of this Silverlight was released in the market in December last year and it has now support Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari browsers. Their partners included Akamai Technologies, Brightcove, Eyeblaster, Limelight Networks, Major League Baseball and Netflix. In the meantime, Microsoft has claimed this new release is the only solution that enabled content providers to tap into the technologies of Windows Media while harness the concept of rich interactive application experiences. As using it on the web, window can be resize or overlay with the support of the vector-based graphics. Also, it successfully integrate with the various infrastructure such as Apache and PHP, JavaScript and XHTML on the client-side. However, it’s a lightweight version, thus may not support all the codecs that are needed for the web playback.

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