Noah Gedrich, director of technology at Blitz, a Los Angeles interactive advertising agency, said his company has been an early user of Silverlight since it was known as WPF/e back in October of 2006.

"By providing a real competitor to the Flash Player and the Adobe Web tools, Silverlight has the potential to force both Adobe and Microsoft to be more responsive to the needs of the end users and the designer and developer communities," Gedrich said.

KickApps Corp. delivers KickApps, a community building platform that supports Silverlight video technology. Alex Blum, CEO of the New York-based company, said: "As we get more aggressive with leading with our custom video player capabilities and media management followed by social networking, we felt it important to have this solution [Silverlight] as well as Flash, which at this time lacks DRM and HD support."

However, Blum added that KickApps expects Flash "to match these capabilities soon; but we also expect that Microsoft will be successful with driving demand with many of our big media partners in particular. And we want to be ready for that."

Jon Rauschenberger, chief technology officer at Clarity Consulting, of Chicago, said Silverlight is enabling his firm to deliver all manner of RIA and other applications to customers.

"Specifically, we do a lot of work in the retail industry and are seeing a lot of interest in building cross-channel solutions using WPF/.NET that can be deployed in stores on XP Embedded and now brought to the Web using Silverlight," Rauschenberger said.

Meanwhile, Javier Muniz, chief technology officer at Granicus in San Francisco, said: "When Silverlight 2.0 is released, the .NET support will allow us to improve the interactivity of our player and integrate it with more data source, and by doing so improve public access for our customer's constituents." Granicus uses Silverlight to deliver a rich streaming video experience for municipal government applications, Muniz said.

Microsoft on Dec. 10 announced that the National Basketball Association will employ Silverlight on NBA.com to further enhance the online video experience for NBA fans around the world. Major League Baseball already is a user of Silverlight on its MLB.com site

NBA.com will feature a full-screen NBA photo gallery, offer video highlights and deliver additional interactive applications throughout the site using Silverlight, Microsoft officials said. By using Silverlight, the NBA will be able to better access its extensive digital video library and provide fans with access to more online video features. Silverlight will also be utilized on www.WNBA.com and www.NBADevelopmentLeague.com.

Ash Rofail, president of Santeon, an Alexandria, Va., software solutions company, produces applications for NBA.com and uses Silverlight.

"We have many customers who are excited about it [Silverlight] such as; NBA.com, RealEstateVideos.com and several others," Rofail said. "We are using Silverlight to develop front-ends that offer a very rich user experience to interface with our content management system. We have done the same with Flash and will replicate the same level of rich functionality with Silverlight."

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