14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is cooking an early preview of the next iteration of Silverlight and is gearing up to offer a taste of Silverlight 3’s successor in just a few days. The International Broadcasting Conference (IBC), scheduled between September 11 and September 15 in Amsterdam, will act as the stage for the Redmond-based company to deliver a sneak peek at the future media features it has planned for Silverlight 4. According to the software giant, the focus will be placed on native multicast support and support for offline digital rights management (DRM) via the Microsoft PlayReady technology, both of which will be integrated into Silverlight 4.
Having delivered Silverlight 3 RTW Build 3.0.40624.0 on July 20th, 2009, the company is moving onward with the development of its alternative to Adobe Flash. Silverlight 4 will be focused on fueling a new approach as the way PC and Mac users consume video content. Of course, the critical factor of this equation is digital rights management. Support for DRM generates new scenarios in which media companies will be able to offer materials to customers.
Silverlight 3 already introduced out of browser capabilities. In this regard, the combination of Silverlight 4’s out of browser capabilities along with offline PlayReady DRM will effectively allow customers to purchase, download and then watch movies, including copyright protected content, on their computers, on both online and offline scenarios. Seeing how the Silverlight browser plug-in is supported on both Windows and Mac OS X, with the Moonlight open source project porting it to Linux, Silverlight 4 opens up a new world of platform-agnostic movie viewing experiences.
And fact is that this is the direction Microsoft is going toward. The Redmond-based company announced a collaboration with Tesco, enabling the online retailer to serve virtual DVDs to UK customers starting this fall. With the advent of Silverlight 4, I suspect that virtual DVDs which can be viewed thanks to the out of browser capabilities of Silverlight will become more common.
“These features will enable movie studios and retailers to provide the same rich interactive experiences via digital copy and Internet distribution as consumers get with DVD or Blu-ray. Silverlight 4 will enable movie studios to go beyond these experiences and also offer network-delivered updates, special offers and live events, and extend their relationship with consumers past the single movie purchase,” Microsoft noted.
Silverlight 3 GDR 2 Build 3.0.40818 is available for download here.