By Jeff Cogswell. Adoption for Silverlight is growing as Microsoft announces new DRM support. 

New technologies take time to grow and gain adoption. Microsoft’s Silverlight is no exception. Here at DevSource, we started reporting on Silverlight about a year and a half ago, when it was still called by its code name, WPF/E. Since then, Silverlight 1.0 was officially released, and Silverlight 2.0 has been announced. And this week at the NAB Show 2008 in Las Vegas, Microsoft has made several announcements regarding the future of Silverlight.

The first announcement is a news item: Silverlight adoption is growing. On average, 1.5 million people are downloading the Silverlight plug-in daily. In my own web surfing, I’m seeing more and more sights with Silverlight content—sites that are not Microsoft sites or developer sites.

In the various forums and blogs, as one would expect, people have been arguing over whether the world even needs Silverlight, and whether it will ever come close to the level of Flash content. It’s true that Flash is huge, and Silverlight has a long way to go to reach Flash. But many people have pointed out a single issue that makes Silverlight far preferred for us developers: Silverlight development is easy. Yes, when you get the Adobe tools, Flash development isn’t all that difficult either, but for those of us used to .NET, we can easily make the transition to Silverlight. And there are a lot of .NET developers.

In fact, an independent research firm agrees. My colleague, Darryl Taft, over at eWeek, spoke with the CEO of Evans Data, who predicts that in the next 12 to 18 months, Silverlight’s market share will triple.

I mentioned that I’m seeing a lot of sites that now have Silverlight content on them. Microsoft has noticed this as well, pointing out that media companies in particular are latching on to Silverlight. (NetFlix is one. They use Silverlight for streaming movies to your PC.)