And during the 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing, NBCOlympics.com, powered by Silverlight, had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams and 600 million minutes of video watched, increasing the average time on the site—from 3 minutes to 27 minutes—and Silverlight market penetration in the United States by more than 30 percent, Microsoft said.

“Silverlight has been a massive success,” Goldfarb said. “We aren’t going to take our foot off the pedal. There was never a question in my mind of whether we would reach ubiquity; it’s always been a question of when.”

In addition, organizations such as CBS College Sports, Blockbuster, Hard Rock Cafe International, Yahoo Japan, AOL, Toyota Motor, HSN and Tencent are building next-generation experiences using Silverlight.

“CBS College Sports Network streams more than 20,000 hours of live content annually for our 150-plus college and university official athletic partners, so we demand that our video player environment be both consumer-friendly and robust,” Tom Buffolano, general manager and vice president, Digital Programming and Subscription, CBS Interactive-Sports, said in a statement. “Silverlight was the perfect choice to help develop and power our new, exclusive online collegiate sports experience. Silverlight also gives us the most flexibility in expanding the product in the future as we develop embeddable players and mobile platforms and explore new advertising integration opportunities.”

Meanwhile, also in a statement, Keith Morrow, CIO at Blockbuster, said standout Silverlight 2 features for Blockbuster are “new rich controls such as data grids and advanced skinning capabilities, as well as support for the .NET framework,” which allows the company to access its existing Web services.

Silverlight 2 also supports a variety of programming languages, including Visual Basic, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby and also features support for platforms such as Mac OS, Windows, and Linux in Firefox, Safari and Windows Internet Explorer browsers.

Other key features include content protection, and improved server scalability and expanded advertiser support, Goldfarb said. The enhanced content protection comes in the form of Silverlight DRM, powered by PlayReady, which provides content protection for connected Silverlight experiences, he said. In addition, Microsoft is providing new streaming and progressive download capabilities, superior search engine optimization techniques, and next-generation in-stream advertising support, Goldfarb said.