Microsoft slips out Silverlight 5 In one of its quieter launches, Microsoft has made Silverlight 5 available for download, and rumors suggest this may be the last major upgrade for the code. Among the full list of improvements are hardware decoding of H.264 unprotected content using the GPU, support for 64-bit browsers and a rewritten graphics stack using …
Given that LoveFilm have just changed from streaming Flash movie delivery to streaming Silverlight movie delivery in the last week or so (apparently due to major film studio pressure, no big surprises there), this was interesting timing.
*Idle thought* Wonder how long it'll take someone to crack it wide open? */Idle thought*
So LoveFilm has just cut-off all its customers who can't run Silverlight. That includes non-Intel Mac and GNU/Linux users. And what about the many non-PC devices that (used to?) have access to the LoveFilm service, like the PS3?
Well I see from the announcement that "this change doesn’t affect or apply to any of our streaming devices (PS3, iPad, internet TVs, etc); only PCs, laptops and Macs."
http://blog.lovefilm.com/uncategorized/why-were-switching-from-flash-to-silverlight.html
And apparently this was done on the insistence of the MAFIAA®, as a "robust anti-piracy measure". But how "robust" is it if half the service is still using Flash, with little prospect of those other devices ever using Silverlight? And how exactly does it benefit the MAFIAA® to cut-off customers and send them running into the welcoming arms of The Pirate Bay?
They didn't really think that one through very well, did they?
One day the MAFIAA® is going to wake up to the fact that DRM and platform-dependent technologies only serve to LOSE revenue. If you take away people's choices, they have no option but to seek "alternative" methods, legal or otherwise, most of which don't send any money in the direction of the publishers.
But then very little of that money ever trickles down to the actual artists anyway, so maybe it really doesn't matter either way. Maybe the only "fair" way of obtaining content is to "steal" it from The Pirate Bay, then send money directly to the artists. That way we get content without restrictions, and the people who actually deserve to be paid for that content get their money.
One thing's for sure: I'll never be a LoveFilm customer. I can't be. LoveFilm has effectively blacklisted me from its service, by refusing to allow my OS access to its content.
Oh well, that's their loss, not mine.
The fatuous "percentages" argument won't magically transfer my money into the content provider's bank accounts, nor will it change the fact that I'm now forced to seek "alternative" means of procuring that content.
Like I said, it's THEIR loss, not mine, however small you think that loss may be.
And given the number of non-Intel (e.g. ARM) devices out there running Silverlight-incompatible operating systems, I'd say it's a fairly heavy loss.
You do realise that ARM expects to ship about 7.5 billion chips this year, compared to about 320 million Intel chips, don't you? Do you also realise that (according to Gartner) Microsoft's mobile platform only accounts for about 1.5% of those ARM chips (of which only about 0.66% is "Phone 7")?
But hey, if the content providers want to piss-away all that potential revenue, it's no skin off my nose. I'm only too happy to keep my money, and put it to better use.
given that there are a very small portion of people who can't run Silverlight - and they're mostly on old/ailing machines that won't support HD video very well I doubt LoveFilm are losing nearly as much as you think... and not protecting their content witha decent DRM solution (ie PlayReady) would mean loss of access to their library of content... which would hurt their business more than the low single digit percentage of users who only have an unsupported Mac or Linux machine.
the platforms where they are using non-Silverlight technologies are either locked down to the point where hijacking the streams would be non-trivial task or also have PlayReady support
It's a shame. Silverlight is a pretty productive environment to develop for. We'll have to see what HTML5 will bring, but I'm expecting the usual 2 days to develop and 20 days to get it to run nicely everywhere kind of approach. Maybe I'm getting old but fiddling endlessly with CSS has put me right off being a software developer.
Silverlight has made some pretty big inroads into corporates and are replacing intranet web applications because of its easier development model; it also allows developers to provide fat-client functionality to users through a browser, so avoiding the usual deployment hassles in large corporates. Also, as almost all corporates have IE 6-8, which are CSS manglers, using Silverlight allows you to avoid the inevitable problems when your organisation upgrades its browser.
His point is that development in Silverlight is more productive than development on the web tech stack - which is something I happen to agree with him on. The ubiquity of the platform is an entirely different question, so I can see how you failed to see his argument when you go off on that old "but it doesn't run on every device" tangent.
LOB developers wanted this feature because it was a common scenario that the application needed greater access to the client PC to interact with say, legacy components or bespoke hardware.
The feature is enabled for enterprise roll-out through a group policy and the application assembly itself must be certificate signed to match with that policy. Without this, no elevated trust is provided to the application by design. So the risk is malicious code attempting to break that design - but that risk applies to everything - the application, the plugin, the browser. Nothing new there.
The online streaming was never great but now they've shifted it to Silverlight it's just about unwatchable.
I'm using an older XP machine and I get about 4fps now and each of those frames is fully of jagged artefacts.
Ok my PC is old and my bandwidth is narrow but it was better before.
I suppose the intention is that eventually HTML5 (video and canvas) will replace Silverlight, but in the meantime I wonder what Microsoft expect existing Silverlight users to use. I can't imagine they want them to recode everything in Flash.
Also, is Moonlight (the open source clone) still being developed?
Yup MS have always had a ten year support policy. Usually five years of full support and a further five years of limited support, security patches and bug fixes.
This is rather better than the likes of Mozilla who drop old versions as quickly as they can. Their idea of a bug fix or security patch for an old version tends to be to upgrade to the new version. Not great for users who have to stick with old versions for reasons of compatibility.
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