Microsoft has begun shipping
Silverlight 2,
the company's rival to
Adobe Flex, for
creating multimedia web applications that include audio and
video.
Microsoft is planning to work with
the open source community
to add Silverlight to the Eclipse open source development
environment. A preview version can be
downloaded from
today. The full version is due in the second half of 2009.
The company has been trying to get more users to run the
product. During the 17 days of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing,
Microsoft said that the NBC
Olympics website, powered by Silverlight, had more than 50
million unique visitors.
The site coped with 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video
streams and 600 million minutes of video watched, increasing the
average time on the site (from 3 minutes to 27 minutes). Other
users include Blockbuster, Hard Rock Cafe and Toyota.
