Kshitij Sobti

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Posted on 27-11-2009

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Soon we will have silverlight content on the iPhone! Well not really. However, apparently Microsoft has "worked with Apple" to bring one of the most important functions of browser plugins today to the Apple iPhone, web video.

Web video has rightly become the domain of the Flash player, and is one of it's claim to fame an ubiquity. Now Microsoft's Silverlight is treading on Flash Player's turn by providing playback of video content in Silverlight on the iPhone.

It is by no means the full Silverlight browser plugin, however Microsoft has used a combination of server side features and client side support for video playback in the iPhone safari browser to enable video content delivered using Silverlight to also work on iPhones.

By enabling their IIS server to detect requests made from the iPhone browser and responding with the correctly encoded video stream, combined with using a <video> tag on the client side, they can enable Silverlight video content playback on iPhones.

So basically, if you cut out all the crap, Microsoft is using the video tag as a way to deliver video content on the iPhone, the same video tag which incidentally isn't supported on their own Internet Explorer 8 browser.

Microsoft believes this is a positive step towards gaining ubiquity. That it is. Let's see the score though:

• iPhone 4 roundup: gets Adobe Flash 10.1 port, coming to Verizon...
• iPhone 4G to get 720p HD video recording
• Android 2.2 will have Flash support; Apple is like North...

• Adobe Flash: Windows 9x, Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OSX, Solaris, Linux, and soon Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm WebOS
  
• Silverlight: Windows XP/Vista/7, MacOSX, iPhone OS (video only)
  

It's difficult to declare a winner with such little information.