Microsoft enables Silverlight video streaming to iPhones

November 28th, 2009

At PDC 2009, Microsoft demonstrated Silverlight video streaming to an iPhone. While Microsoft user experience platform manager Brian Goldfarb said that Microsoft “worked with Apple” to make it happen, don’t expect plug-ins for Mobile Safari to start flooding the App Store. Instead, Microsoft worked to make its IIS7 server software capable of sending an QuickTime-compatible stream to an iPhone embedded with a HTML5 <video> tag.

Though Silverlight is more than just a video format—it’s more of .NET authoring runtime for web-based applications, much like Flash as become—its media delivery features are what content providers wanted on the iPhone. “The promise of Silverlight is that it’s a cross-device, cross-browser, cross-platform solution, and it works the same on Macs as it does on Windows,” Goldfarb told BetaNews. “The iPhone is a unique scenario. We talked to our customers…and they said, ‘Look, we just need to get our content there, and it’s mainly in the media space like broadcasting, and we want to put it on the iPhone.’”