Microsoft Releases Silverlight 2
What does the average consumer have to do in order to get Silverlight 2? Nothing, according to a Microsoft representative, if any previous version has been installed.
"Installation of Silverlight 2 will happen automatically," said Scott Guthrie, Corporate VP in Microsoft's Developer Division. "No explicit action required to upgrade from Silverlight 2 beta to final release or to upgrade from Silverlight 1. It will be upgraded automatically over the coming weeks."
For those who can't wait, though, Silverlight 2 will be available on Tuesday, October 14.
Along with the final release of Silverlight 2, the Visual Studio Development Tools that work with Visual Studio 2008 are also being released, as well as Visual Web Developer Express, a free version of Visual Studio.
Expression Studio 2, which shipped earlier this year, will have an upcoming data pack update for Expression Blend 2, free to those who have Silverlight Studio.
When asked about Silverlight’s penetration rate, Guthrie used two sets of numbers.
"Silverlight 1, which shipped 12 months ago, started the adoption process," said Guthrie. "About 1 in 4 consumers have access to a machine with Silverlight. Some countries have adoption rate over 50% and we expect to see deployment accelerate."
When pressed on this question by a CNET reporter during the announcement call at noon Eastern today, Guthrie elaborated.
"How do you get to the penetration rates to a level where web developers will take you seriously?" the reporter asked.
"We've taken a few years to get Silverlight to where it needs to be," responded Guthrie. "On the day this 2nd version ships we're at the 1 in 4 number, and we think that the new feature set is compelling enough for developers to adopt is, since it lets them do work at a higher level than anyone else."
"People don't think of it as 'I'm installing Silverlight'," continued Guthrie. "They're thinking 'I want to watch my favorite team' so we're being more aggressive in pushing more content out there, and you'll continue to see other commercial apps and announcements along the lines of the HP announcement earlier this year, where they are installing Silverlight on all new machines."
Guthrie then noted the number of customers that have gone live on Silverlight 2 since its announcement in March.
"The most significant adoption was in August," said Guthrie, "where NBCOlympics.com had an average of 27 minutes of viewing time on their site for each visit. If you have a quality experience you can provide tremendous stickiness. We also had broadcasters in France, the Netherlands, and Italy broadcast the Olympics on Silverlight."
Silverlight was also used to stream the Democratic National Convention. Later this month, CBS College Sports Network, with almost 20,000 hours of streaming for NCAA games, will roll over to the final Silverlight 2 release.
Blockbuster will go live later this month, to buy or rent movies online, and on the interactive side, AOL Mail with 60 million users, is launching on the final version of Silverlight 2.
"Assuming we have a year of great customers going live," said Guthrie, "I'm comfortable we'll see the adoption accelerate."