Forget Flash! Microsoft is building Silverlight for iPhone

This one from BetaNews certainly caught us off guard.  If Apple is hesitant to let Flash come aboard the iPhone platform, they’d be insane to let Microsoft’s Silverlight aboard, right?

Interestingly, Apple and Microsoft have been working together, or at least communicating  on a iPhone port of Silverlight. 

“We did all the work…We just made sure Apple was comfortable with it.”

From the description of the concept, it doesn’t seem like Apple is actually changing much about the iPhone, nor the way it interacts with Web servers.  However, Microsoft, on their IIS servers is building a mechanism by which Silverlight video content, stored serverside, can be streamed along to the iPhone in a format that the iPhone can use.

In essence, they are just building a server-side workaround for video playback.  Much like Youtube videos, which show a link on the webpage then stream MP4 files to the iPhones video player.app  Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb stated:

“We’re translating the content to support the MPEG2 v8 [decoder] format that the iPhone format; we’re moving it to their adaptive streaming format. So it’s the same IIS smooth streaming content, the same server, the same point of origin, but now I can get that content to play without any code changes, without any real work, on the iPhone. That’s the critical thing for our customers.”

While it might be easy just to blow this one off, we’d note that NetFlix is based on Silverlight and if what this Goldfarb character is saying is true, we could be mere months away from having a iPhone Netflix Mobile service.