Microsoft's Silverlight technology to challenge Flash, offers high definition online video
Microsoft is pushing ahead with plans to release Silverlight, formerly "Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere".
Silverlight comprises a set of technologies based on the Windows Presentation Foundation programming interfaces shipped with Windows Vista.
It allows for different multimedia types to be displayed on screen, including vector graphics and video files.
Importantly for the move to high definition, Microsoft says that Silverlight can deliver streaming videos encoded with VC-1 at up to 720 lines of resolution. Flash currently has a limit of 576 lines, though I can't see why this couldn't be improved in future versions.
Silverlight claims to be cross-platform (take that with as much salt as you like) whilst development tools, unsurprisingly, are for Windows only.
Of course this isn't the only solution for encoding high definition content on the web, and it will be interesting to see how aggressively Microsoft market this, particularly as a replacement for the hugely popular, but currently standard definition limited, Flash.
