Netflix and Media Center, and HD video

Today our friends in our Entertainment and Devices group announced that Netflix would be available in Windows Media Center. This is great for Silverlight, as this means that the Silverlight application will now be hosted in Windows Media Center.

There have been lots of blogging and announcements here, but the important thing that this denotes is that this continues to re-affirm our companies commitment to use Silverlight. Silverlight has only been out over 18 months and with over 200+ applications on Microsoft.com and MSN.com alone, we are continuing our momentum and growing market penetration which is great for all the designers and developers out there. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of downloads in the market already (in such short amount of time) thanks in part to our own properties and also those of our partners (like Netflix, Blockbuster, CBS, NBC, HSN, AOL, and many others).

One we just launched was EBay to create an auction item tracker in IE8 that allows you to track auctions in real time from within the browser. SL3 is now in beta and we have seen tremendous demand since our announcements at Mix and NAB. The launch of our Smooth Streaming (click here for a demo of 1080p playback) technology at NAB and the ability to "really" do HD video reliably with PVR over HTTP has helped to drive Silverlight mind share and I would say that the remainder of this year and 2010 will be really great for Silverlight and HD video on the net. Thanks to all of you who are making it happen.