Microsoft Announces Silverlight 2

Microsoft announced that the final version of its Silverlight 2 Media Player has been finished. Silverlight 2 is already available for download on Microsoft's web site. Among the new features are support for digital rights management technology, improved cross-platform support and deep zoom technology.

Microsoft also disclosed some numbers for the Olympics work it did with NBC. Over a 17-day period, NBCOlympics.com had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video watched.

Overall, Microsoft said the Olympics helped boost Silverlight's U.S. penetration by 30 percent.

Still, that means Silverlight continues to have a very long way to go to compete with Flash, which is installed on nearly all Windows PCs. Silverlight is already at the one in four number and the company will continue to do deals to boost penetration, as it has with HP which includes Silverlight on its PCs.

Existing users of both Silverlight as well as the Silverlight 2 beta will be automatically be upgraded to Silverlight 2 over the coming weeks.

Microsoft has ambitions to work together with Apple and put Silverlight on the iPhone.

As for compatibility with Google's Chrome browser, the initial release had a couple ot issues with Silverlight, but in the latest developer release of Chrome, Silverlight 2 works perfectly.