Move Over Flash, Silverlight has a Better Chance on the iPhone

Friday, November 27, 2009

A Microsoft manager revealed and demonstrated Silverlight video streaming on the iPhone this week. He admitted that Microsoft “worked with Apple” to bring Silverlight’s media experience to the iPhone. This is a stark contrast to Apple’s stance over Adobe’s Flash, in which Apple is the only major smart phone company that refuses to integrate Flash content into its mobile browser.

Silverlight, though capable of running full web applications, is often used to run video streams. It is the main engine that powers Netflix’s on-demand movie platform. To bring Silverlight to the iPhone, Silverlight communicates a QuickTime request to the IIS server when encountering HTML 5’s<video> tag , which then decodes the MPEG-2 v8 file dynamically and starts streaming video to the iPhone.

This concept is similar to how YouTube currently works on the iPhone. Silverlight on the iPhone could probably be another app that is installed on the iPhone. When a user clicks on a Silverlight video link, it would be directed to the Silverlight app. That would also be the reason Silverlight video streaming technology could be allowed on the iPhone. As a separate media player, Silverlight would not interfere with the business on the App Store. Thus, for those who wish to run web apps on Silverlight technology, do not expect that Apple will allow such a feature to exist on the iPhone.

Silverlight technology on the iPhone could open a new chapter of streaming content delivery on the iPhone. After all, Silverlight is known for delivering quality streaming videos, partially attributed to its GPU acceleration capabilities. With Silverlight, Netflix, or other quality movie streaming services on the iPhone may just be moments away.

This is a post by The Apps Machine