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Poor Flash, it just can’t catch a break. LoveFilm is the latest to eject Adobe’s once-mighty streaming wrapper in favour of Microsoft’s also-ran Silverlight, after pressure from paranoid Hollywood bent LoveFilm over a barrel.
In a blog post, LoveFilm said:
“We’ve been asked to make this change by the Studios who provide us with the films in the first place, because they’re insisting – understandably – that we use robust security to protect their films from piracy, and they see the Silverlight software as more secure than Flash.
Simply put: without meeting their requirements, we’d suddenly have next-to-no films to stream online.”
Now the use of Silverlight might not make that much of a difference to Intel-Mac or Windows users — it’s just another bloody plug-in that you have to install — but Silverlight leaves Linux and PowerPC-Mac users hung out to dry. HTML5 was considered, but the lack of secure DRM solutions meant Silverlight was basically the only option to appease the insecure studios.
Both Flash and Silverlight will run alongside each other for LoveFilm’s computer-based movie streaming, but Flash will have the rug pulled out from under it in the first week of 2012. Occupy Flash will be happy no doubt, and while I’m no advocate of Flash, Silverlight’s still a bit crap. It’s a shame there’s no robust copyright protection available within HTML5 to sate the money-grubbing studios. [LoveFilm via The Register]
Rumour going around that MS is planning to ditch Silverlight as well. Guess we’ll see.
That’d be interesting. I wonder what Hollywood would end up doing. Maybe they’ve got a provision for online streaming in their UltraViolet DRM they’re going to try and force on us.
Does Silverlight work on Android? One more situation where the mobile user suffers.
LoveFilm’s got an iPad streaming app. Not sure about Android, think its only queue managing etc.
No Streaming on Android yet, but it would be an embedded solution like the iPad rather than Flash or Silverlight either way should it appear.
Lovefilm’s streaming is reportedly pretty poor anyway – so unless this will bring about a boost in quality too, I think it’s clear that they’re going to have a -serious- struggle on their hands to keep Netflix from gobbling up their market when it finally lands here.
Lovefilm really need to step up their game, and quick.
True story, I was talking to a friend who does security, he was telling me about a group of developers who’d built a secure Silverlight app that was so leaky it basically had to go back in the oven for 3 months.
Well done Hollywood, now I can *pay* for a stream and keep a copy thus mostly making the process guilt free.