image In a press release today, presumably partly timed around PDC, Netflix have announced that they’re going to start streaming TV and Movies using Silverlight to deliver the content instantly.  Why have Netflix chosen Silverlight, well it looks like two reasons

  • PlayReady gives them built in DRM
  • It’s cross platform, so the same stuff is viewable on a Mac client too

This is a little of what the release says…

“Silverlight with PlayReady offers a powerful and secure toolkit for delivery of dynamic streaming, which offers faster start-up, and higher quality video, adapted in real time to users’ connection speeds,” said Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt. “Members who enjoy watching movies and TV episodes from the growing library of choices that can be instantly streamed at Netflix will be thrilled with this next generation improvement of access and quality, on a broader range of platforms, including Intel Macs and Firefox.”

“Instantly streaming from Netflix directly addresses the needs and wants of today’s Web users by providing on-demand, high-quality online video,” said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft Corp. “By using Silverlight, Netflix can deliver to its subscribers a higher quality video experience on the Web, on more platforms.”

So this is some pretty cool stuff.  [WARNING: pure speculation coming up] I  wonder how this is going to be delivered to Media Center and just tying things up I wonder (and this is pure speculation) if November 19th is going to bring Silverlight to the Xbox 360 with the new XBox Experience.  With Netflix being such a big thing on Xbox I’d suggest it could offer us some possibilities. 

Are there any Media Center apps using Silverlight at the moment, if not why not?

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