Netflix is at Mix07 and they showed a very cool demo of their next version of Watch Now, which is built on Silverlight. It was just back in January that Netflix announced this service, which was dependent on a DRM plugin for IE (v7?), meaning Mac and Firefox users were shut out.

Adobe’s Apollo certainly isn’t going to be a slam dunk now.

Perhaps the most startling aspect about Silverlight is that it decouples platform technology, in this case .Net, from the Windows platform itself. Whereas previous .Net components required Windows, Silverlight is browser independent, works on with Mac and Linux clients, and runs on Apache and Darwin servers (among others I would expect). Microsoft has with their actions indicated that their business units are no longer interdependent and that’s a really good thing.

The Netflix demo itself is pretty damn cool, I’m looking forward to being able to take advantage of this myself.