Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

There is all kinds of Silverlight news going around right now because of Microsoft’s 3–day MIX Conference. It started with the announcement with Microsoft giving away 4GB of hosting space for developers to store their media, and then came one of the much awaited demonstrations…

When Silverlight was originally announced Microsoft made sure to mention some of the big companies that they had already partnered with. They obviously wanted to show that they could provide a great user and developer experience  that would compete with Adobe’s media player offering. Microsoft was able to get Netflix on board to develop a solution for movie subscribers to stream movies to their PC using Silverlight, which meant that the entire experience was all contained within the browser.

In just 3–weeks time (as stated in the video below) Netflix was able to put together a service to let subscribers instantly stream movies at HD-quality along with DVD-like navigation:

There are also some demos available right now that you can try out yourself. Here are a few that Microsoft has listed on the Silverlight Homepage:

• Fox Movie trailers – I have to admit that I would love to watch all of my trailers on an interface like this, and at that quality. I also like how it is close to watching a DVD since it has the “chapter” navigation.
• Dynamic ads – uh oh, there could be a new breed of “shoot the monkey” on the horizon!
• Future Microsoft Homepage – This is actually pretty cool even though the only functional thing on the site is the navigation box on the right side. The first thing I noticed is that it sports a live search feature that displays matching results as you type. If you click on any of the navigation categories you’ll be presented with the results in a customizable view (one of the options looks like the Flip-3D in Vista). You’ll also notice that the background is blurred out when this window comes up.
  
• MSDN homepage – Nothing overly exciting here…just a popup media player.

Silverlight can be installed by going to this page and downloading the 1.4MB setup file. I was able to have it installed in under 30 seconds, so the process is pretty painless.

Source: Webware

Thanks to Oliver Daniel for the tip!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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