Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plug-in that incorporates animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback in a customizable application. Microsoft Silverlight creates a highly interactive and rich Internet application that attracts users with aesthetic design and functionality.
Silverlight offers many capabilities of Flash but in an enterprise programming paradigm familiar to developers. Microsoft - wanting to make a splash - introduced new capabilities including deep zoom which allows for high performance zooming accomplished through asynchronous data loading and adaptive streaming. Adaptive streaming is an example of performance optimization through on-the-fly modifying of the download stream based on user bandwidth and CPU speed.