Viewing videos on the web will now be made even better with Microsoft’s newly launched Silverlight. Just last Tuesday Microsoft officially launched Silverlight rich media player 1.0 version. This new offering is said to be the fierce rival of the currently and widely used Flash media format that’s being offered by Adobe System’s Inc. Flash is the one being used in various video streaming sites for example YouTube. Silverlight has digital rights management (DRM) and makes use of Windows Media for the playback video feature. Through Silverlight media streaming, rich UI and animations can be easily viewed.

Since Silverlight is a new media player, Microsoft is on a campaign, attracting partners to use this tool in delivering their videos and other Web content. Microsoft is relying more on partnerships for Silverlight’s promotion rather than urging individual users to download it. The company seems to be achieving this goal quite well with prominent partners like Home Shopping Network, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), Entertainment Tonight, MLB.com, Netflix Inc and CBS Corp.

Through these strong partnerships, Microsoft hopes that download for Silverlight will peak to 200 million by June next year. I think this won’t be a hard goal to reach since it Silverlight can run on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.

Microsoft will also be working with Novell for Linux version of Silverlight called Moonlight.