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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Biggest reason: support for Silverlight is crap on the Mac, nonexistent (for video) on Linux. Market penetration for Silverlight is very low, so a large percentage of Netflix users are forced to install it or upgrade for the first time (which is lame).

Why would Silverlight be chosen on its technical merits in an engineering-driven company? I don't see many other companies making that choice and I certainly wouldn't.

I happen to know that Microsoft is very interested in persuading big web sites to use Silverlight. I always assumed someone at Netflix was bribed^Wpersuaded with an XBox integration deal, or some other licencing/partnership deal.

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Netflix has to deal with DRM. I've asked this question before, and it's not just the "oh, this is good, let's use it!" they've experienced the linux question plenty of times before. They have to submit to whatever their content providers demand they use. Right now, it's Silverlight. :/

I don't buy that. Why is Flash good enough for Hulu's content providers, but not Netflix's?

And why are they okay with Netflix not using Silverlight on the iPad/iPhone?

because there is no silverlight for iOS.

Silverlight was chosen LONG ago (fall 2008). It was and is FAR better than the shitty windows media player version of streaming.

Perhaps netflix has found other methods of DRM that the studios approve of since fall 2008?

silverlight supports a DRM implementation that the Studio's are happy with.

The alternative would be flash (which is a steaming pile of shit for osx and linux) and DRM for flash is shockingly expensive.

With silverlight, I can watch a 720p video on my mbp and use less than one core. I can not say the same for flash.

> With silverlight, I can watch a 720p video on my mbp and use less than one core. I can not say the same for flash.

A 720p video from Netflix? That definitely wasn't the case for me last time I tried, maybe 2 months ago.

edit: to clarify, it's not even possible to stream 720p from Netflix on a Mac, regardless of how many cores it might take.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/52575/hd%20silverlight%20osx.png

OK, that's a lot nicer than it used to look. Apparently they enabled that in May.

I'm still not happy about needing to install Silverlight, but at least the quality is now comparable to what I get on my Xbox 360 and PS3.

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