We are seeing great adoption of Silverlight for premium media solutions. In the last few months we’ve seen companies like Canal+, TV2, and Maximum TV launch both live and on-demand Silverlight solutions.

Silverlight 5 will enable media experiences to go even further by adding:

Hardware video decode: Silverlight 5 now supports GPU accelerated video decode, which significantly reduces CPU load for HD video.  Using Silverlight 5, even low powered Netbooks will be able to play back 1080p HD content

Trickplay: Silverlight 5 now enables variable speed playback of media content on the client with automatic audio pitch correction. This is great for training videos where you want to speed up the trainer while still understanding what he’s saying

Improved power awareness will prevent screensavers from kicking in while you’re watching movies while allowing the computer to sleep when video is not playing.

Remote-control support is now built-into Silverlight 5 - allowing users to control media playback with remote control devices.