With the rapid innovation of playable media for mobile devices running strong, Microsoft announced that they’d be shifting away from Silverlight towards HTML5. This shift probably left a certain number of Silverlight developers abandoned even as Bing dropped its Silverlight foundation for HTML5.

According to an article on The Next Web, it became obvious recently that Microsoft intends to bring Silverlight over to the Xbox 360,

… a new job posting from Microsoft today should put a smile on the face of every Silverlight fan.

Microsoft, it seems, is bringing Silverlight to one of its most successful product lines: the Xbox 360. Yes, “looking to hire motivated developers with a passion for creating ground breaking multiscreen platform experiences,” Microsoft is going to bring the power of Silverlight to its living-room behemoth.

“The Xbox 360 is already one of the easiest console platforms to develop on, as Visual Studio languages are amongst the most well known and widespread app development environments. Adding Silverlight to the mix on the Xbox portends an incredible expansion to this potential," says Mark Hopkins of SiliconANGLE. "With the obvious focus that Microsoft is putting on the console towards encouraging cord-cutting, bringing Silverlight in is an obvious nod of the head towards indie broadcasters and online video distributors: ‘Come on over–we’ll give you a place in the livingroom.’”

We picked up a small number of details about the announcement over at WinRumors, and it does look like Silverlight is getting an API boost with it comes to in-home media, television, and movie viewing experience,

Introducing Silverlight 5, Guthrie said the next version is a “major new release” that brings new enhancements for media. Silverlight 5 introduces the following support:

• Hardware media decoding – can stream 1080p video on Netbooks
• Trickplay – variable playback of video and audio including pitch correction
• Power management – less battery used during playback and richer power management
• Remote control – 10ft experience against a PC and can take advantage of remote controls for playback
• 64-bit version of Silverlight
• Databinding enhancements

The salient point that we’re catching here happens to be the remote control aspect. The rest of the details seem to be directed to delivering streaming media to other devices, and some enhancements to make sure it’ll run on as many systems as possible.

With Silverlight available on the Xbox 360 expect to see a lot more developers using it to generate downloadable content that will provide interactive media experience. Already the Xbox 360 has a variety of video content that users can watch to catch up on their favorite mini-episodes of Microsoft video game variety reviews, information, and etc., but with Silverlight it will open the door to independent developers generating applications that utilize the full breadth of this streaming media engine.