So, as of yesterday Microsoft announced at the National Association of Broadcasters conference and through its various blogs that it is now calling WPF/e…wait for it…Silverlight.

Why is this important? The name isn’t, but the technology behind it is. The name simply gives us something much shnazzier to call the WPF/e (that didn’t really roll off the tongue). WPF/e as I mentioned before is the next wave of web technologies courtesy of the guys in Redmond. Releasing the new name is simply the first of many announcements regarding this tech that will be coming over the next few months.

Other than the name, the following was announced.

* Expression Media Encoder – a feature of Microsoft Expression Media, which enables rapid compression and Web publishing of digital video from a variety of popular formats including AVI and QuickTime.
* IIS7 Media Pack for Windows Server –the Media Pack is for customers wishing to enable cost-effective delivery of downloaded media through bit-rate throttling and other advanced features such as cache-proxy support.
* Broad support from leading media companies and solution providers for Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft’s approach to media experiences and rich interactive application development.

Microsoft’s MIX event is where more information about this tech will be announced.

Now Microsoft keeps telling us that WPF/e err…Silverlight is not a competitor of Flash, but I am not sure how long they can keep saying that with a straight face. The media encoder and IIS7 enhancements clearly show they are going after the video streaming market that Flash is currently dominating. That is Flash’s big thing…no one does embedded video better than Flash right now…and here comes the gorilla with a big banana of video enhancements ready to take on this strength head on (think I took the analogy a little far with that one…).

We will see. The next few months should be really interesting on this front. Once I hear something, y’all will be the first to hear.