Over at CCarper's Business of Silverlight Blog I learned:

"The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) on Monday announced the release of “Digital Video In-Stream Ad Format & Best Practices Guidelines" for Digital Video Advertising. The IAB and it's sub group the Digital Video Committee is a group of 145 companies that have created a set of guidelines and best practices for integrating Digital Video Ad's online. These guidelines support the most common types of ads and supersede the 2005 recommendations which included:
 

• Linear video ads
• Non-linear video ads
• Companion ads

This is really exciting for us because they now include recommendations and best practices for the use of Silverlight (.xap) as an approved format for advertising online.."

Wow this is big news, that means good things for the future of Silverlight in Digital Video Advertising. Silverlight's streaming format is now an APPROVED format by the IAB. This is huge news. Especially since .XAP's only appear in Silverlight 2.0 which is still publicly in beta version 1.0.

The .XAP format is a serious win for Silverlight Video Streaming and Microsoft. Considering the IAB and just around 145 companies have recognized this as a standard format, it means great things for Silverlight. It definitely has a bright future in digital advertising. It took an extemely long time for the competition to get recognized at all. Seeing this organization and body of companies support .XAP as a standard is a great thing.

Hearing things like this makes me not worry about Silverlight adoption because it will do well with all the support getting thrown it's way..