Bonum Certa Men Certa

Netflix Considers Dumping Silverlight



Summary: As Microsoft withdraws Silverlight from the Web one of its biggest clients apparently walks away

Netflix chose Silverlight a long time ago and on various occasions we blamed it on the board, which had former Microsoft staff. Recently, Netflix made a lot of noise about its use (as in exploitation) of Free software, even though it denied access to its services from GNU/Linux- and BSD-running machines, partly due to Silverlight, which is a dead project now (one among many). "For streaming," wrote Joab Jackson over Christmas, "Netflix mulls using DASH over HTML5 instead of Silverlight" (see our new Silverlight wiki). Here is what Netflix wrote some days ago:





In order to help achieve this goal, we are looking into a number of options. We are already actively participating in the MPEG committee for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) to define an industry standard for adaptive streaming, together with Apple, Microsoft and a number of other companies.

The proposed DASH standard covers the first five items listed above: It defines a way to advertise a range of different streams to a player together with the information it needs to pick which ones to stream. It also defines media file formats suitable for adaptive streaming. The file formats enable efficient and seamless switching between streams, enabling a player to adapt to changing network conditions without pausing playback for re-buffering. The standard considers the differing needs of both on-demand services such as ours, and live services. And it’s all based on the use of industry standard HTTP servers.

We expect to be able to publish a draft of a Netflix profile describing a limited subset of the MPEG DASH standard early next year. It will define the requirements for premium on-demand streaming services like ours and will take advantage of hooks included in the DASH standard to integrate the DRM technologies that we need to fulfill our contractual obligations to the content providers, thus covering the sixth item on our list.


The Netflix case is important because to Microsoft it is a major case study regarding the use of Silverlight. If Silverlight as a whole dies (which inevitably it will), that won't be good for Vista Phony 7 [sic], either.

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