Earlier this week Microsoft released Silverlight 3.0 to the world which brings with a lot of big improvements and many new features that are beginning to make it a real competitor to Adobe’s Flash. I wasn’t planning to write anything about this but I got thinking about what this could mean for me and my techy stuff and it dawned on me how good this could be.
Let me show you the power of Silverlight through the smooth streaming demo; this is what got me thinking. I was surprised how well this worked and wondered how soon I would really get to see it being used and where. I expect it will be used by companies who stream videos at the moment, such as the BBC with their iPlayer, and this will be excellent, but, focusing on Microsoft where else might it be seen?
Windows 7 Streaming
Media Player 12 in Windows 7 has a new feature that allows users stream their media collections to another linked-account-user-profile anywhere around the world. Being able to access your media wherever you are (as long as the media PC is turned on) is great but I think it has more potential then just being able to access your music in your local cafe.
It could be that Silverlight could be used to smoothly stream your movie collection around the world to another of your PCs. Useful to people on holiday, working away or just living away who don’t want to have to take all their DVDs and Bluray discs with them or for Netbook users.
XBox Streaming
We know that the smooth streaming will be used on the XBox in the Zune Marketplace and Netflix but what if there was more to this. Maybe be movies you have bought on your XBox could be accessed on your PCs around the world using the same smooth streaming. Taking the idea further could it be possible to smooth stream games from the XBox to PCs, i suppose similar in some ways to OnLive.
Zune & Phone Streaming
The Zune HD will be hitting stores later the year, internationally I hope, and will feature a web browser and many other improvements but again I would like to see more integration between services so would it be possible to stream your entire Media collection to your Zune using Media Player’s Streaming options. If that was possible would it also be possible to go the other way, knowing that Zune HD supports at least 720p can it wirelessly stream it movies to other PCs.
It is constantly being rumoured that Windows Mobile 7 will support Silverlight so if this can be done on a Zune HD I see no reason why Window Phones wouldn’t be able to offer similar services.
Conclusion
Maybe I have misunderstood how powerful Silverlight 3 really is or how it works but I would love to see a great integration between these services and the ability to have my media in one place and not on each of my devices but still be able to access the media with no lag. On the flip side it would be entirely possible to have all my media spread out and hopefully that wouldn’t matter as I would be able to access wherever I was as though it was all on one device.
