In an unlikely twist, Microsoft has successfully demonstrated streaming video powered by their Silverlight technology playing on an iPhone. The technology uses server-side transcoding and an HTML5 video tag, and displays Silverlight content in a native H.264/MPEG-2 v8 format recognized by the iPhone's built in Quicktime player. Most surprising was the response of Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb when asked how they succeeded with Silverlight where Adobe had failed with Flash: "We worked with Apple."
Goldfarb explained that their users wanted their Silverlight content to play on the iPhone. YouTube served as effective inspiration on making the content device-independant.
"So we've worked with Apple to create a server-side based solution with IIS Media Services," Goldfarb continued, "and what we're doing is taking content that's encoded for smooth streaming and enabling the content owner to say, 'I want to enable the iPhone.' The server will dynamically make the content work -- same content, same point of origin -- on the iPhone. We do this with the HTML 5
