Microsoft's New Platform Lights Up the Web
As companies seek to differentiate their brands and deepen the connection with their customers, there are a number of new and existing scenarios on the Web that are enhanced by delivering rich and compelling user experiences. Microsoft’s new Silverlight platform provides a rich development framework for building a new wave of rich media applications that incorporate audio, video, animation, and graphics in a seamless way.
For end users, Silverlight offers a free plug-in that allows Windows and Linux PCs as well as Macintoshes to display fancy animated ads, run games and play DVD-quality video, all inside the Web browser.
For designers and developers, Silverlight provides a cross-platform solution for delivering richly interactive experiences for the Web and beyond. It is a key part of the next-generation Web platform from Microsoft, delivering visually stunning and interactive user experiences. It supports multiple operating systems (including Apple Macintosh OS X) and combines 2-D animation, video, and audio within a lightweight yet flexible browser plug-in (currently under 1 MB).
All that really means is Silverlight can greatly enhance Web-based media presentations and make corporate Web sites really come alive with inviting, rich media presentations. Until now, online video has been associated with Flash, and most users are familiar with the constraints that such video has such as quality levels and fullscreen viewing. But using Silverlight you can distribute multimedia at quality levels up to 720p (high definition) — the same 720-line resolution used by DVDs. Depending on bandwidth, videos start playing either immediately or after a few seconds of caching. That ensures that picture quality doesn’t degrade, even in native full screen.
Here are some specific reasons why you might want to use Silverlight:
- It supports playback of WMV files on both PC and Macintosh, with many options for interactivity during playback. Silverlight supports full-screen 720p video and offers seamless transitions between full-screen and windowed mode without losing your position in the video.
- Silverlight is just a 1MB download on a PC. It supports Windows XP and above, with Windows 2000 support to come.
- Silverlight is blindingly fast – for example, you can play many videos simultaneously without stuttering or dropping frames (subject to network bandwidth, of course).
- Silverlight uses the VC-1 video codec, which includes content protection features. VC-1-based systems such as Silverlight and Windows Media Video are very attractive to movie studios and others conscious about protecting their content and making money from it.
- Content authored in Silverlight is purely textual and can be indexed by search engines, and therefore drives traffic to Web sites.
- Silverlight allows features such as drag-and-drop, and rotate-and-zoom, which enable a more pleasurable and intuitive user experience. This enhanced level of interaction can make a website more fun to use and can even increase traffic.
To find out more about Silverlight, and to download the plug-in and samples, check out the new Silverlight Web site at www.silverlight.net
