Microsoft Silverlight could outbeat the Adobe Flash

The famous Flash program from Adobe might get a real contender pretty soon, cause Microsoft officially showed a preview of the Silverlight, at NAB 2007 that is in progress this days in Las Vegas. Meant to facilitate building rich interactive multimedia applications for the Internet, this cross-platform software brings some features that Flash lacks, like HD 720p video streaming.

Like Flash, the SilverLight is a plug-in that can be installed on both PCs and Macs and is compatible with IE, Firefox and Safari Internet browsers. The applications looks great and are easy to made. A preview list is available on Microsoft’s site, to show some of the capabilities of the Silverlight to the public. They are impressive.

Sean Alexander from Microsoft presents the technology in a short interview bellow. take a look, you won’t regret it.

Delivering media experiences has never been easier before. With the help of the Expression Studio, a free software delivered by Microsoft, you can create rich and incredible looking aplications in just minutes. The Expression Studio is backwards compatible with most of the video formats known, like Quicktime, avi, Mpeg4 and so on. The Expression Media Encoder, part of the pack, is the ultimate tool for professionnists, allowing them to enhance their videos. You can easily crop the movies, introduce intros to a video, both static and animated, or add notes, watermarks and chapter points inside the video stream. This are easily done with the help of the preinstaled templates and functions.

For further enhancements, you can combine the Expression Studio with Visual Studio, the advanced tool for programmers from Microsoft, creating games and advanced interactive presentations. All the scripting is done in Ajax, and this might be another advantage over the Flash. Using an already popular programming language might attract the fans. On the other hand, Adobe’s plug-in uses its dedicated scripting language, the Actionscript.

Silverlight is a vector based technology. The presentations can be easier resized, the image remaining crisp. And this is important, especially when you want to watch the trailers of the hottest incoming movies, in high definition 720p format. Cause Microsoft signed a deal with Fox Studios in order to deliver this block-buster trailers on the Internet. And since this is the only technology able to stream 720p online, the Silverlight will get quite a tremendous launch…

Being a Flash fan and developing some applications in the past years, i can say that the Silverlight is impressing. I can’t wait to grab my hands on it and see what can it do. I’ll get back to you with the further impressions sometime soon.