If there can be only one benefit from Silverlight, I hope it would be the recent accomplishments from Avenue
A/Razorfish (taken from Jason Mauer's notes while blogging the keynote at MIX):
Scott Guthrie is a pimp. He's bringing up the folks from Netflix and Avenue
A/Razorfish to talk about how they've been using Silverlight. "Unprecedented
collaboration between our designers and developers." Silverlight supports VC1
encoding as well as 720p... real-time delivery for rapid start, movie browsing,
etc. They're now demoing the Netflix movie player using Silverlight. Movie loads
up in 2 seconds... one mouse click and it's running fullscreen. Integrated
controls like chapters, interactive ratings, reviews, similar movies... all
inside the the film itself. They built the first working demo in 3 weeks.