[Posted Oct 27th 2008 6:49AM]

"Silverlight is designed for delivery of cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences inside a Web browser."

Silverlight is a Flash player wannabe, with the added "attraction" that OS X and Linux, and non-MS browsers will always receive an inferior experience to Internet Explorer and Windows.

Flash isn't perfect but there is little reason Netflix would have chosen something else unless Microsoft paid them a big pile of money or concessions (e.g. free server licences) to use their fifth wheel.

[Posted Oct 27th 2008 12:58PM]

Well, we also live in America were competition is king, and so far MS is the only one to offer a legit competitor to Flash. Complain all you want about MS trying to be like Adobe, but at the end of the day, at least there is a reason for Adobe to advance Flash player now. Just look at the recent release of version 10 after how long a gap from 9?

And maybe MS just has a more versatile player. Good for the consumer then who can get a better experience. Plus, Silverlight works on Firefox, so that support should be close as well if you don't like IE.

[Adam (Unverified) Posted Oct 27th 2008 1:03PM]

Maybe Microsoft paid for it, but I doubt it. I think silverlight probably was chosen for its integrated DRM that flash lacks. It's all conjecture and just pointless.

[Posted Oct 28th 2008 6:42AM]

Microsoft has a long, long history of paying lip service to cross-platform, cross-browser or open standards and then dumping it when the competition has gone bust or given up. Prior examples:

* Releasing IE for Unix for free so people don't buy the Netscape browser on Unix. Once Netscape died, IE for Unix was canned.
* Removing scripting support in WMP9 for Mozilla browser so sites like ESPN and others no longer work in anything but IE.
* Extending HTML with proprietary scripting languages (VBScript) and ActiveX tags to tie it to Windows
* Poisoning run-anywhere Java by adding delegates and other proprietary extensions to the MS implementation so they only run on Windows.
* Extending Kerberos with proprietary extensions so it is incompatible with other implementations.
* Railroading "Open XML" (MS Office file format redone as XML) through ISO certification even though the spec is 10x larger than OpenDocument Format and riddled with holes. All to shut down ODF before they have to support it.
* Poisoning .NET with PInvokes, ActiveX and other extensions that encourage (and often require) developers to make native Win32 calls, thus tying .NET to Windows
* Paying lip service to cross-platform .NET by informally endorsing Mono but shifting the goalposts continuously (and continuing to make it easy to poison apps with native calls) that Mono will never catch up.
* Basing Silverlight on proprietary WMP codecs instead of industry standards like H264.
* Not even bothering to implement Silverlight on Linux, laughably pretending that "Moonlight" (the Mono implementation) is somehow going to perfectly support proprietary codecs amongst other things.

Etcetera.

While Adobe isn't perfect, it does run cross platform, implements various industry video formats like H264 and has DRM too if that's what Netflix wants. More importantly Adobe doesn't own an operating system or a browser so they have no incentive in pretending to support OS X or Linux and then pulling the rug later as part of the game plan. Microsoft does, and has done it plenty of times in the past.

I see no reason for thinking Microsoft have changed. If you think this time is going any different then you are fooling yourself. I see no reason that Netflix would go Silverlight except for an enormous money hat to do so. If you see whitepapers or case studies for Netflix show up on the Silverlight site you will know exactly that's what happened.