Silverlight - a growing phenomenon - already at 25% penetration

We have been ecstatic over the last year at the customer reception of our new product offering, including our RIDE version that uses the rich media power of Silverlight.  As many of you know, we were one of the first (if not the first) commercial application launched using Silverlight(SL) 1.0.  Since then we have continued to improve our reader experience and add options to make every reader have an accessible and user friendly viewing option for all our magazine and newspaper customers (ie. Digital AnyWhere).

Silverlight 2.0 has been in the works for some months and was recently released to the general public.  Those readers who had SL 1.0 will be automatically updated to the new version over the next few weeks. 

While we knew that this cross platform viewing environment had significant benefits on many fronts, it was going to take a while for it to achieve mass level of adoption (like Flash, for example  on home based computers).  We were very enthusiastic with download rates which were initially 1.5 million per day.  Then came the Summer Olympics and the growth rate increased tremendously.

Finally we got new information that was better than we had hoped for!  In an October 13, 2008  Microsoft press release issued in conjunction with the release of Silverlight 2.0 to the public, Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president at Microsoft noted, “We launched Silverlight just over a year ago, and already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed.” In addition, "..Silverlight adoption continues to grow rapidly, with penetration in some countries approaching 50 percent.."

This is fantastic news for our publishing customers and their readers.  Achieving such a rapid level of penetration in only a year shows the power that Silverlight has - and this is only expected to increase.   Many application developers were waiting on the sidelines until the more mature SL 2.0 was released to begin commercial deployment, so this should only accelerate adoption further.