Read/WriteWeb has the story that Microsoft have launched a technology preview version of Silverlight, a competitor to Adobe’s Flash technology.

Today at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB2007), Microsoft and Adobe have gone tit for tat with product launches that directly target one another. Our previous post covered Adobe’s launch of a new Internet video solution, that competes with Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. And Microsoft has fired right back, unveiling Microsoft Silverlight – a re-branding of their WPF/E technology (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere). In its announcement, Microsoft describes Silverlight as a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering media and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. So basically it is Microsoft’s equivalent to Adobe’s Flash.

A Microsoft employee blog post on the subject gives a bit more information. The marketing copy states the main features:

• Deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIA) for the Web that incorporate video, animation, interactivity, and stunning user interfaces.
• Seamless, fast installation for users, thanks to a small, on-demand, easy-to-install plug-in that is less than 2 megabyte (MB) and works with all leading browsers.
• Consistent experiences between Macintosh computers and Windows-based personal computers without any additional installation requirements.
• Create richer, more compelling Web experiences that take greater advantage of the client for increased performance.
• Stunning vector-based graphics, media, text, animation, and overlays enable seamless integration of graphics and effects into any existing Web application.
• Enhance existing standards/AJAX-based applications with richer graphics and media, and improve their performance and capabilities by using Silverlight.

Microsoft unveiled the new technology at the National Association of Broadcasters event in Las Vegas (also announced there were various updates to Apple’s Final Cut Studio, see our sister blog YouMakeMedia for details).

Microsoft is clearly taking this opportunity to push their technology which Silverlight leverages, including XAML, .NET and various components of a web-oriented version of the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Certainly Silverlight does provide some additional functionality over what Flash currently does. Interestingly, one of the things that is mentioned as coming soon is DRM support for Silverlight content, which will be implemented for both platforms. This is, quite interestingly, quietly noted on one page rather than being shouted about by Microsoft.

Perhaps I’m missing the point, but at the moment, I don’t really see the point of using something like Silverlight over Flash. While it does promise to leverage plenty of interesting new technology that Flash currently doesn’t or can’t support, feature-wise there appears to be little practical difference between the two.

Of course that could well change. Microsoft are saying that they’re keeping something under wraps, so this could be the ‘killer feature’ that they haven’t explained just yet.

Either way, it will be interesting to watch this project and see if in the coming months, Microsoft can continue to work on Silverlight until it can convince website producers that Silverlight delivers significant benefits over Flash. Only time will really tell.

Pre-release versions of Silverlight are available to download for Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Mac OS X Tiger (Universal binary) from the official site.