Neal Page, CEO of Inlet Technologies, a Raleigh, N.C., maker of encoding solutions for video, said: "Silverlight will extend the reach of content to consumers on any platform, much like Flash does today."

Yet, "The quality is a significant differentiator, and this will ultimately become a differentiator for paid-for content as well as 'free' content that drives revenue via in-line ads, ancillary ads, brand affinity or providing Web support of traditional content revenue streams," Page said.

Page also said that compared to Flash with the On2 codec, Silverlight offers significantly better quality plus the benefit of ubiquitous playback.

"By virtue of its Windows Media platform roots, it has the ability to utilize DRM for revenue models that require this," he said. "Shortly after the announcement of Silverlight, Adobe announced they would support H.264 in Flash. This will normalize the quality differences at some point, but the DRM capabilities and other development tools still fall in Silverlight's favor. The downside is that it is very new and not yet as widely deployed as Flash."

Oleg Kokorin, CEO of MS Team LLC, an offshore software development company based in Novosibirsk, Russia, said that using Silverlight for RIAs is a natural fit for his company because they specialize in .NET development and have extensive experience in building Web 2.0 applications and server-based solutions.

"I hope with the Silverlight 2.0 release it would be possible to create equal or even richer web interfaces," Kokorin said. "Adobe's Flash was the only appropriate technology for this purpose. Flash allows creating very attractive and convenient user interfaces. But we use Microsoft ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL technologies for developing other layers. This complicates and raises the cost of the development."

Kokorin said MS Team uses Silverlight "to develop web interfaces for animation, video and audio players, casual games, charts and so on. We are looking forward to build our first mobile application using Silverlight."

Chris Johnson, managing partner and founder of Terralever LLC, a Web site design and interactive marketing firm in Tempe, Ariz., said Terralever's been working with Silverlight 2.0 since the alpha release over the summer and they created a game, called "Zero Gravity," using that alpha to demonstrate what the new technology could do.

"Where the 1.0 release and it's reliance on JavaScript made the creation of complex, rich internet apps difficult, the ability to use C# in 2.0 is a huge advance for an agency like ours," Johnson said.

"Traditionally we've built our rich media and game projects in Flash/Flex; but now that we can leverage C# and it's data binding capabilities and integration with Visual Studio 2008, it is becoming a viable option for these projects," Johnson said. "We've been chatting with a few clients about how to start integrating Silverlight into their online efforts. In fact, we're currently in discussion with a very large casual gaming site about creating a Silverlight 2.0 game for them."

Next page: Users Itching for Silverlight 2.0