Silverlight 3 Announced

Today in San Francisco we announced availability of Silverlight 3 and Expression 3. This is a major milestone as we move forward delivering on our advancement of development and design for the web and push the boundries and innovate on key area's of work flow, delivery and experience. Key features such as Sketchflow, Smooth Streaming (live) and Out of Browser push the bar for RIA's and experiences within them. Being able to leverage our 6M developer community is critical to the success of our business and partners have stepped up to deliver very compelling experiences, while solving some very challenging problems for our customers.

We also announced some very important customer use cases with NBC Sports announcing support for Silverlight as the preferred platform for HD delivery moving forward. NBCSports has been a leader in helping to bring about successful applications online with the Olympics, and we are excited to partner with them on many other brands like the AVP, Wimbledon and the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. This partnership will yield great results for consumers as we move forward delivering never before used features online like PVR, Slow Motion, and Instant Reply. We are looking forward to working close with NBC Sports on new and ground breaking applications online.

We also demonstrated the power of Silverlight in the enterprise with Accenture TV which automates and delivers real time video and meta data for corporate communications.

Continental Airlines also demonstrated how they are able to improve customer services with their internal line of business applications for their gate and reservation agents.

You can see all the announcements here in the press room, but overall a very good day today.

Thanks to all that made this happen!

Silverlight Powering Wimbledon 2009 Delivery in HD

For those who have not seen it, Silverlight is powering NBC Sports coverage of Wimbledon 2009. You can check out the player features developed by another terrific Silverlight partner, IStreamPlanet. The player is set up to allow you to watch the various courts at your selection, and to fast forward, rewind, and even instant replay on live feeds. NBC even provides highlights and all the day's footage in case you missed the action.

Thanks to Mio and the crew for a great application, and NBCSports for the great content!