Check out Silverlight

I’ve been wanting to blog about Microsoft’s new multimedia platform, Silverlight, but didn’t really know how to get into it and, truthfully, didn’t really understand what it was. But here’s a good way to check out what Silverlight is and what it does.

CBS Television Distribution’s Entertainment Tonight signed a deal with Microsoft a few weeks ago to create an Emmys mini-site featuring the new platform. It’s cool – very little text, tons of video, no wait time for downloading or streaming, and no obvious player – Silverlight integrates right into your existing browser.

What is also cool, as far as I’m concerned, is that I’m using Firefox and Vista and Silverlight (1.0, no less!) and it all worked just fine. That wasn’t true when I first started using Vista in March when tons of things didn’t work with my new OS, and Microsoft hasn’t always been so happy about Firefox, but interoperability doesn’t seem to be such a big deal in Web 2.0, unless you are Apple.

You do have to download Silverlight in order for it to work, and you can do that here. Microsoft has a whole site dedicated to Silverlight if you want to learn more. I wonder if the technology is our first look at a nearly all-video-driven Web 3.0.