Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology is on the horizon and theres already quite a bit of commotion as to how the Flash platform will hold up against it. Silverlight touts DX9 hardware accelerated 3D and HD video formats, two features that Flash seemingly can’t implement due to Microsoft and MPAA copyrights. While these two features make Silverlight look significantly shinier than Flash the Flash platform has been the industry standard for web based interactive sites and applications for the last decade. With so many artists and developers already behind the flash platform it should be another interesting uphill battle for Microsoft. I can imagine that the HD capabilities will be winning over big time MPAA affiliated production houses and that the 3D acceleration will attract large game studio who will attempt to design web based 3D games, but isn’t that only a small portion of those in the market for animation and interactivity on the internet?

ian News