Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled their latest attempt at breaking into competitor dominated markets: the new technology they claim is destined to supplant the now ubiquitous Adobe product, Flash.

The new platform has been dubbed Silverlight, and is claimed to be the all-singing all-dancing second coming of online media. Why is this such an important upgrade over current technologies, you might ask? The answer is probably put best by Microsoft’s own press release.

“Silverlight customers will also enjoy compatibility with the broad ecosystem of Windows Media-enabled tools and solutions, and the proven scalability and reliability of the Emmy Award-winning Windows Media technologies. At the discretion of content providers, Silverlight will also deliver digital rights management support built on the recently announced Microsoft PlayReady™ content access technology — with feature parity on Windows and Mac.”

Translation: Current technologies work too well with unrestricted and non-Microsoft formats, so we’ve made our own platform from scratch, based on entirely in-house technologies that will all need to be licensed. Yay DRM!
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