Silverlight is a cross browser, cross platform plug-in that delivers a consistent user experience across browsers, and can reproduce deployed client performance in the browser.  If you look a little deeper it could be considered a little more than a plug-in.  In fact it could be considered a development platform.  It should not be thought of to replace existing browser targeted technologies, but to augment their capabilities.  In fact browsers were designed with browsing in mind, so it could be argued that the new capabilities in Silverlight are more appropriate for developing and delivering a richer experience within the browser.

So what business value can Silverlight bring:

Next Generation Media Experiences

A seamless video capture, distribution and playback experience can be delivered due to the range of supported codec's in the Silverlight player.  Supported codec's include WMA, WMV and MP3.  This can eliminate the requirement for expensive and time consuming pre-production processing, which ultimately can reduce the cost of getting video clips onto the web.  This also reduces the time between the initial creation of the idea to its consumption.

It's very simple to overlay artefacts on top of video.  So if a movie trailer is being played in the browser, links to further products or additional information about the movie can be placed on the video.  Delivering a compelling click through experience to the user.  This leads to the potential for up-sell and cross-sell of products, in addition to increasing stickiness of the site because of the additional value it can add.

Video can have associated meta data.  This means that it is easy to tag different points within a video with additional information.  This information can be used to enable richer use of the video content, for example easy searching within the content.  This obviously reduces the cost of pre-production processing, and increases the value and usefulness to customers.

Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

Features such as drag and drop, rotate and zoom, enable a more pleasurable and intuitive user experience.  You can see some video examples here, and play with some samples here.  Previously this level of interaction was expensive to develop and maintain.  This enhanced level of interaction can make a website more fun to use, which can in turn increase traffic.

Team Structure

Because the Silverlight runtime can consume XAML in the same way that WPF can, it means that a design and development team can be structured in a more appropriate way.  The designers can use a design tool, such as one of the Expression products, and deliver the design in XAML to the developers.  The developers can then take this XAML, import it into their development tool and add the code that implements the business functionality.  This type of team structure can improve efficiency, resulting in a product being delivered faster to market, as well as improving the overall quality of the final product.

This way of working has many benefits including the designers original design actually gets implemented in tact, and the design is abstracted from the business logic.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Because the content authored in Silverlight is purely textual it lends itself to be indexed and therefore, theoretically more discoverable.  I say only theoretically because currently search engines do not search for, and index XAML files.  However there are some interesting approaches to solving this.  Taking this approach results in a web property being listed by a search engine, this in turn drives awareness and traffic to the site.

I hope the above ideas and examples have given some food for thought as to Silverlight's applicability to web based scenarios.

Simon Thurman