Windows Media technologies have been used for a long time to deliver audio and video content over the Internet and in private Intranet because of several factors such as low infrastructure costs, high scalability, digital rights management and very high quality.

This means that a lot of sites used the Windows Media Player ActiveX control to allow users to connect and play the content. While this enabled developers to give access to this content easily, it always had some drawback such as the fact of not being cross platform (only works on Windows and Internet Explorer).

With the release of Silverlight there is now a much more effective way to deliver this content since it supports all the protocols and standards used by Media Player (such as ASF, WMV, WMA, WMS and WM DRM) and provides additional benefits such as being cross platform, cross browser, easier to deploy, easy to customise, etc., etc.

Xavier Pouyat, Deployment Program Manager, and Alex Zambelli, Media Technology Evangelist have just published a whitepaper on how to migrate applications based on the WMP OCX to Silverlight which covers a lot of angles and I would definitely recommend anyone who is considering this move to read.

You can download the white paper here: Silverlight Migration Guide: Upgrading Your Windows Media Player Online Experiences