Microsoft Corp. continues its push for the Silverlight browser technology. At the NAB Show 2008, the software giant announced new adoption of Silverlight by media and content companies worldwide, including Madison Square Garden (MSG) Interactive, Tencent, Abertis Telecom, Terra Networks Operations, SBSi, MNet and Yahoo! JAPAN.

"Silverlight offers customers and partners the highest quality creation and delivery of media, protected content, advertising and rich Internet applications, and we are committed to making it easy for partners to integrate and extend Silverlight capabilities," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft, in a statement.

Microsoft Silverlight was first released in April last year as a competitor to Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, Adobe Shockwave, Java FX, and Apple QuickTime. The 2.0 incarnation brought improved interactivity and allows developers to use .NET languages and development tools. Silverlight’s advantage compared to Flash is that it reduces development and deployment costs and provides enhanced Web audio and video streaming and playback, being fully compatible with Windows Media Technologies.

Many have been lured into considering Silverlight a competitor for Flash because of the shiny interface that characterizes Silverlight applications and because of the video-rendering capabilities of the plug-in, which kind of makes it similar to Adobe Flash Player.

Silverlight is a cross-browser and also a cross-platform plug-in, integrating with both Windows and Macintosh, and with Linux in the near future; it enables rendering of richer user experiences that are defined by XAML; it renders media (music and video); it enables programming that is consistent with the Web programming model and it is smaller than Flash.

"Our implementation of content services enabled by Microsoft Silverlight has significance for both Yahoo! JAPAN and Microsoft," said Masahiro Inoue, CEO of Yahoo! JAPAN, in Microsoft's statement.

"We strive to respond promptly and appropriately to the constantly evolving Internet environment and customer needs, and I have high expectations that our use of Silverlight will enable us to provide better services to our customers," Inoue said.