With all of the talk about Apply not playing nice with Adobe and therefore pushing Flash even further off its platform it seems we have lost site of what these tools really do and why they are important.
Silverlight is Microsofts "version" of Flash. Flash of course has been around for a much longer time than Silverlight and is a much more mature product. However, Silverlight is based on the .NET programming platform and the Window Presentation Foundation (WPF) layer. This means for a much more robust and extensible programming language and capability than Flash and Activescript can provide. This will allow you to creative the immersive content that will win in a Web 3.0 world.
Mark my words now, content will become less and less Video based and more and more interactive and immersive based as time goes by. That means more then just chaptering videos. It means tight integration with social networks such as keying of videos to twitter flows. It means interacting with other around the content on webcams and messaging. And Silverlight looks to be a great platform to creative these incredibly immersive experiences- that is of course if enough people are willing to download the SIlverlight environment into their browsers. And it also depends on how deep of an experience HTML 5.0 will be able to provide - my suspicion is that it will be very good but not as deep as a platform based on a true programming language and environment.