Goodbye Silverlight | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye Silverlight

blog.smartbear.com

14 pointsBaustin15 comments

> To get the same quality and security in HTML5, there is a need to implement video extensions into the players via the use of DRM encryption and JavaScript to the Netflix servers.

This is completely disingenuous. DRM has nothing to do with security, and it is for sure not required to get the same quality.

On the contrary, DRM always compromises security and always reduces the quality of the content (in a sense of crippled usability).

I agree that DRM compromises usability. However, I don't think the author meant that DRM would needs to be there in order to help out the quality.

Usability should be viewed as a quality aspect. Reduced usability means low quality product.

Agreed. I think the author should have said "In order to satiate content owners' demands, developers will need to implement DRM. The quality of HTML5 streaming still needs work."

Thank you. You are correct that I should have elaborated here. There definitely seems to be some confusion on my stance to DRM from the way I stated it.

It is required to get the same quality if the suppliers of your quality content won't give it to you without it.

Therefore it's not requried for the quality at all. They use it to oblige some perverted suppliers, instead of telling them to drop the DRM. In practice they can influence the suppliers but Netflix didn't even attempt, instead they are rushing to put DRM into HTML.

> Despite that issue, we want our videos streamed in high quality and securely

Based on the previous paragraph (about getting Netflix to almost work on Linux), I'm guessing that the "we" here is consumers of video, not producers or distributors. In which case, no, "we" do not give a rat's ass about whether our videos are streamed "securely."

"We" want to watch what we want to watch when we want to watch it. Content producers insisted on "security" and Netflix chose Silverlight as a short-term technical solution to that problem. No one else wanted it. We just tolerated it.

It seems hard to say goodbye when the thing that is supposedly leaving is going to hang around for another 7+ years.

Not sure why this is news now; Microsoft announced this back when Silverlight 5 was first supported back in December of 2011.

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Microsoft-support-Silverlight...

  > it actually says 2021 or the support lifecycle of each of the supported 
  > browsers, whichever is shorter. When IE 9 is no longer supported you can 
  > pretty much consider Silverlight unsupported as well.

... though technically there are +'s next to the alternative browsers (Firefox 3.6+, Safari 4+, Chrome 12+) so there's plenty of wiggle room left for interpretation.

The reason it's being talked about is because Netflix's recent transition plan is a milestone--the only Silverlight application I knowingly use is finally going away.

Many window users faced Silverlight quality issues themselves due to their .Net frameworks not being up to date. For the best performance, they needed to download the .Net 4.0 SDK in Windows, which is something the average Netflix customer would not be willing to do.

Silverlight doesn't require the .Net framework on the machine. Not sure what performance issues he is talking about but Silverlight has better streaming features and performance than flash or html5.

And good riddance..

Indeed.

...in your opinion.

But even so, it's not really going away.

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