The Future of Silverlight
There's been a lot of discussion lately around web standards and HTML 5 in particular. People have been asking us how Silverlight fits into a future world where the <video> tag is available to developers. It's a fair question—and I'll provide a detailed answer …
Context & Ripple Effects
This post lands mid-debate. The IE team had already laid out its position on HTML5 video in April 2010, and questions about where Silverlight was headed stretch back to roadmap queries on the Silverlight blog in 2008. By September 2010, the arrival of the HTML5 <video> tag gives developers a plugin-free path for the exact scenario Silverlight was built to serve.
What changed today is that Microsoft's Silverlight team stopped treating the question as noise: the official blog acknowledges that a world with native <video> support is coming and commits to explaining where the runtime still earns its place. For a product whose identity has been premium web media, an explicit answer from Redmond matters more than any third-party analysis.
First-order effects
- Developers and media teams evaluating Silverlight for upcoming projects now get Microsoft's own framing of when to use the plugin versus waiting on native HTML5 video — the decision criteria shift from community speculation to vendor guidance.
- The Silverlight team itself must defend the runtime's scope publicly, narrowing its pitch to what the <video> tag cannot do rather than competing head-on for basic playback.
Second-order effects
- Browser makers pushing HTML5 video adoption gain a rhetorical opening: even the plugin's own vendor concedes native video is arriving, which strengthens the case for investing in standards-based players instead of Silverlight-based ones.
- Content publishers who built delivery pipelines around Silverlight face a fork — extend their investment per Microsoft's answer, or start dual-tracking an HTML5 fallback to hedge against a shrinking plugin footprint.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, proprietary rich-media runtimes survive only as complements to open web standards — handling premium DRM'd video, offline, and out-of-browser scenarios — while the general-purpose web moves to native tags, structurally shrinking the plugin layer of the web.
- Platform vendors learn that conceding ground on standards early, while repositioning their runtime for what standards don't cover, becomes the playbook for managing legacy developer ecosystems through transitions.
The trend: Proprietary web runtimes are being repositioned as complements to emerging open standards like HTML5, with vendors themselves setting the terms of the retreat from the plugin era.