So this will be the blog where I espouse the greatness of a product that our software developers use every day. While waiting for my flight back to Denver, I was watching Dexter through Netflix® ‘Watch Instantly’ application on my laptop. I had to install the Silverlight™ plug-in, which immediately drew my interest to see Silverlight in a non-Amadeus Consulting, in-the-wild form. It was time to experience Silverlight as a user, not as a Silverlight developer.

There are a ton of really great features about Silverlight, but I’m going to highlight the one that seamlessly allowed me to watch tons of Dexter on the airport Wi-Fi. The feature is IIS Smooth Streaming.

This is a quote from the Microsoft Silverlight website on the benefit of IIS Smooth Streaming,

"IIS Smooth Streaming, an IIS7 Media Services 3.0 extension, enables adaptive streaming of live and on-demand media via standard HTTP protocols, and provides a high-quality viewing experience that scales on massive content-distribution networks, bringing a fantastic visual experience to any viewer regardless of their connection and computer capabilities."

While this can sometimes be a confusing and technical-sounding benefit, I understood it because I had just experienced it in using the Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ feature. IIS Smooth Streaming = uninterrupted, non-choppy video. Anyone here who has watched the first season of Dexter can attest to the importance of not being left hanging.

So how does it do it? Because a majority of the videos online suffer from bandwidth or loading issues, Silverlight is able to autocorrect the streaming. At the beginning of the video, I noticed after the buffering it said, "Determining quality of video." Part of the Silverlight functionality is to determine your Internet connection, and immediately adjust the quality of the video to the specifications of your connection. This means that sometimes, yes, the quality suffers for a second or two, but it also means there is no annoying "Buffering…" message.

For now, I’ll step off my Silverlight soapbox. I have plenty more Dexter to watch anyway.

Be sure to leave comments below on your experience with Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ or Silverlight in general. Visit our pages on rich Internet application development, particularly Silverlight development.