Netflix ditches Silverlight with support for HTML5 video in IE11

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/26/netflix-ditches-silverlight-with-support-for-html5-video-in-ie11-available-today-with-windows-8-1-preview/

by mindstab • 13 years ago

216 144 13 years ago

thenextweb.com

bsg75• 13 years ago

What does this mean for anything not running IE11?

ihuman• 13 years ago

Hope that your browser supports whatever method Netflix is using

bsimpson• 13 years ago

In the near term, nothing.

dstorey4• 13 years ago

Netflix already support ChromeOS on Samsung Chrome books using this method. Only that Chrome doesn’t support an end to end solution, as it doesn’t support the Crypto API, so Netflix rolled their own. They also support a different DRM plug-in.

As this involves three different specs, which are all from the W3C, this means that it will work in any browser that implements them, and supports the DRM that Netflix uses.

Microsoft and Google are already on board. I expect Opera will inherit this from Blink/Chromium. As both YouTube and Netflix support this already, I wouldn’t be surprised to see WebKit and Firefox/Gecko implement it eventually.

jdangu• 13 years ago

Incidentally, that puts another nail in the coffin for Adobe Flash, which is still widely used for DRM'd video streaming.

scribu• 13 years ago

I never thought I would say this, but I think I would prefer Adobe Flash and other browser plugins instead of making DRM a built-in feature of the web.

randallu• 13 years ago

At least as a browser vendor you just had to implement NPAPI to get Flash -- EME requires contracts and money.

Zikes2• 13 years ago

Netflix will be taking advantage of EMEs for HTML5 DRM in IE11.

Microsoft has not confirmed IE11 will be supported in any OS other than Windows 8.1.

Older versions of IE, including IE10 on Windows 7, will still require Silverlight, meaning it still will not die.

If this is to be a nail in Silverlight's coffin, it's a very tiny one.

Edit: Per freehunter's comment below, Microsoft has confirmed eventual IE11 support for Windows 7.

freehunter• 13 years ago

Many sites are reporting that Microsoft has confirmed IE11 support for Windows 7 [1]. The question is when, not if.

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043129/internet-explorer-11-...

tracker12• 13 years ago

It took an awfully long time to get IE10 for Windows 7. Hopefully this time it will go faster.

mtgx4• 13 years ago

Is Microsoft really releasing a new version of IE with support for only 2 major (8.1, 8.2, etc are just service packs anyway) versions of Windows back?

I guess that's good for everyone, though, since it means IE won't have a huge market share anymore.

mindstab• 13 years ago

And so in a small part the MSIE team is back to "creating" new "standards" for the web because they were the first on board so the get more input to the final product. I hate to say it (in part because I'm not 100% sold on web DRM, tho netflix on Linux will be nice...) but by being sticks in the mud over the issue Google and Mozilla are now going to be following IE's lead for probably the first time in a while

ndesaulniers2• 13 years ago

Over my dead body.

wmf4• 13 years ago

Google implemented DRM in Chrome before IE did.

jlgreco8• 13 years ago

These proposed changes to the standard do not add DRM. Rather they add a standardized interface between javascript in a browser and a proprietary binary blob that actually contains the DRM. Why do you think this would improve the situation of Netflix on Linux?

All you are going to have is a fancy API with nothing to plug into it.

ndesaulniers2• 13 years ago

Also, standardizing EME will not bring Netflix to Linux (the most common misunderstanding around EME). Please name one CDM for a Linux distro other than ChromeOS. Widevine is available only in ChromeOS, and Playready is only available in Windows. So looks like you have to buy one of those Operating Systems to have Netflix.

knome• 13 years ago

tho netflix on Linux will be nice...

What's annoying is that you can run netflix on linux right now[1] via `netflix-desktop`, which combines `firefox`, `silverlight` and a modified copy of `wine` to access their site.

If they switch over to these new plugins and the plugins are IE-specific, we'll be locked out again.

[1] * https://launchpad.net/netflix-desktop * http://www.compholio.com/netflix-desktop/

dstorey4• 13 years ago

The key specs for all this to work are:

* Web Cryptography API[1], edited by Mozilla and Google

* Media Source Extensions[2], edited by Google, Microsoft and Netflix

* Encrypted Media Extensions[3], edited by Google, Microsoft and Netflix

These are not pseudo standards pushed only by Microsoft. ChromeOS already supports two of these specs.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WebCryptoAPI/

[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/media-source/

[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/

fatjokes2• 13 years ago

Thank god. I hate Silverlight. It's so resource intensive.

EDIT: I just felt like ranting against Silverlight some more. The only reason I use Silverlight is because of Netflix. I run it in Chrome on my Mac Air. Besides being buggy and resource hungry, it also doesn't stop my Mac from dimming even when watching a video in fullscreen, unlike YouTube videos, etc. (Could this be because it doesn't use the graphics card?) I watched a movie on it the other day and the audio/video kept going out of sync due to lag (not a network problem) and I had to reload the page every 5 minutes. Aaargh! Death to Silverlight!

arbitrage• 13 years ago

Don't forget buggy as hell! It's got that going for it, too.

rubberband• 13 years ago

Are you implying that Flash is any less resource intensive or buggy?

kenbellows• 13 years ago

Where did he mention Flash? HTML5 video is the alternative being discussed here, and it's far less resource intensive and buggy (depending on the video format), from my experience at least.

hamburglar• 13 years ago

I managed to completely resist installing Silverlight for however many years it's been available, and what finally got me was that I needed it to watch the new Arrested Development.

ripter• 13 years ago

I just watched it on my T.V., the ipad also works without forcing you to install Silverlight.

guelo• 13 years ago

Firstly, this is on IE11 on Windows so it won't affect your Mac. Secondly, you have no idea if the resource intensiveness of this proprietary DRM video decoder will be any better than Silverlight's.

vxNsr• 13 years ago

Well that's what you get for running microsoft apps on a mac, now you know what windows users go through with itunes.

For some odd reason each company makes their apps really buggy and annoying on the other's platform... weird.

goggles99• 13 years ago

Your perception is not based at all on factual evidence. I see people all the time complaining about flash/SilverLight performance problems. The reality is that no browser has so far outperformed either of these plug-ins in terms of CPU or memory utilization.

You might want to use this as a reality check. What other "truths" in your life are actually true and not merely biases created by the agenda's of others around you.

Let truth alone influence you, question all hearsay. Be a leader, not a follower.

fatjokes2• 13 years ago

Wtf??? I'm ranting about my personal experiences... not parroting others'. Can you say the same?

isomorphic3• 13 years ago

Quoting Netflix, from the article:

  We expect premium video on the web to continue to shift away from using proprietary plugin technologies to using these new Premium Video Extensions.

Quoting the article:

  According to Netflix, Microsoft made this possible by implementing three features in its still-unfinished IE11:

  The Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) using Microsoft PlayReady DRM.

Netflix is using some doublespeak here. Yes, Silverlight was a "proprietary plugin", but they've just shifted to using proprietary DRM with proprietary extensions to HTML5. They got rid of the plugin--great! But they've replaced one proprietary experience with another.

makomk3• 13 years ago

In fact, they've replaced one proprietary experience with an even more proprietary one. Silverlight was available on more than one browser and OS; this is Windows-only and IE11-only. I believe Netflix are already using EME on Chromebooks but they have a different, totally incompatible DRM scheme (Google's Widevine).

tmzt2• 13 years ago

But even so, the DRM system was not available cross-platform. Something like Moonlight could process the data but could not play back encrypted video using the Microsoft DRM system.

Each platform will offer a different DRM implementation, but there would be only one HTML5 player and would use the same API on all systems.

I assume that they will continue to use Silverlight on Windows prior to IE11.

jiggy2011• 13 years ago

They will still be rendering the interface and probably the video with standard HTML5 components, in fact even the DRM - Browser mechanism is standardized. It's just that the DRM code itself may be proprietary. So this is still a step forward.

mtgx4• 13 years ago

In what way is it a step forward? Okay, they can now use default video codecs in their proprietary plugin, instead of the same codec being used in Flash.

So does that make it anymore cross-platform than Flash was? And now instead of having "one" monolithic proprietary plugin, it's now more "decentralized" and you'll have to use "many" such proprietary plugins from Netflix, from Hulu, from Amazon, and many others, that may or may not be cross-platform.

Why is the news only about IE (11 even). Does it work in Chrome and Firefox, too?

lukeschlather• 13 years ago

Theoretically one piece of it is now cross-platform, however the core functionality only works on one platform, and actually seems explicitly engineered to be incompatible with the Ubuntu computer I have hooked up to the TV in my living room.

This is a pretty disappointing move, since I'm pretty sure Netflix will never run on that computer, and Netflix doesn't care.

counterpointer• 13 years ago

I think Google has been first in implementing the proposed EME standard in HTML5 video. The ARM Chromebooks have been already using it to see Netflix video since a few months. Netflix can use Silverlight in IE11, but ARM Chromebooks don't have an alternative way of support and don't forget that Youtube doesn't like people easily downloading their videos like they do now.

http://hothardware.com/News/Netflix-Backing-HTML5-But-Not-Wi...

And I think Chrome nightlies had the web DRM in place but were not enabled by default? Don't quote me on that.

Anyway, I think Firefox will be forced follow Chrome and IE now to implement DRM in HTML5 video. Firefox does not have the market power it once had thanks to Chrome.

Remember how the whole H.264 in HTML5 support thing played out for Firefox? They were on the side of not supporting it, and Google said it would remove it from Chrome, but that never happened, and Mozilla finally got tired of the effects of "Firefox doesn't support this site's video, let me use a browser that does" and added support.

The same thing is pretty much guaranteed to happen with EME as sites start using EME to stream video and IE, Chrome and Safari add support.

thezilch4• 13 years ago

"Continue to shift away" doesn't mean proprietary steps can't or shouldn't be taken nor does it mean there will never be proprietary parts behind the scenes. The API to these Extensions are trying to become stable and not proprietary [0]; do you have suggestions or time to contribute? If Netflix is made to simply talk to a ratified API, it is a big step forward from a non-standard API exposed by the likes of Silverlight.

[0] https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-med...

isomorphic3• 13 years ago

You are correct in asserting that the EME should become standardized, and that Netflix is participating in that process. I should not throw stones unless I'm willing to help.

I admit to being conflicted about the philosophical need for such extensions--although I have no pragmatic objections. Netflix makes their coin by selling limited access to an artificially-restricted resource; the resource would probably not exist in its present form without the restrictions.

However, as someone who lived through web development in the 1990s, my brain shut off after reading "away from using proprietary" followed by "Microsoft MarketingTerm".

edwintorok• 13 years ago

Which is why DefectiveByDesign launched a campaign against them: http://www.defectivebydesign.org/cancelnetflix

kevincrane• 13 years ago

Are "Premium Media Extensions" also plugins? Because if so this didn't really get much better. It still means Linux users could be on the backburner until someone decides we can watch too. Until Mozilla and Google are on board this doesn't necessarily seem better from a "universally available" standpoint.

jlgreco8• 13 years ago

Yes. There is no reason to think that things which did not work on Linux before will suddenly start working just because this API is being crammed into HTML5.

mikeryan• 13 years ago

I'm not necessarily saying that Linux will ever be a high priority, but having to only provide a PlayReady Media Extension for a few browsers on Linux is a much more reasonable effort then providing the whole Silverlight or Flash runtime.

nitrogen• 13 years ago

The situation for Linux users is better with Netflix on Silverlight, because Silverlight runs in Wine. With EME or PME or whatever they want to call it to make it sound less onerous, Linux users have no hope.

Premium Media Extensions (which we should probably just call Proprietary Media Extensions) sounds like a marketing name for EME+CDM. We should not let major media providers co-opt the term "premium" to mean "encrypted" or "blessed by Hollywood".

MatthewPhillips2• 13 years ago

Windows in VirtualBox :)

wamatt• 13 years ago

The ideological debate is potentially interesting: Does DRM belong in HTML5?

(and yes, it's hard not to view the Netflix/MS situation cynically)

That said, ditching that godawful Silverlight plugin, is probably a welcome change from the customer experience perspective.

mortenjorck• 13 years ago

Am I the only one who, given the vast proliferation of mobile and TV-connected devices with Netflix clients over the past few years, can't even remember the last time they used the Silverlight app to stream something?

lesslaw• 13 years ago

I don't know but I use it every day. It is how Eurosport delivers its streaming channel to Windows. There is an Android and iOS version. The Android one doesn't allow the 3 hours rewing feature that Silverlight does and drops frames rather than buffering.

http://player.eurosport.com/

jaredmcateer• 13 years ago

I used it every day because I find all HTPC media center implementations of netflix to be lacking so I use it straight through the browser.

mtgx4• 13 years ago

The "good news" is that they are using web crypto, and knowing how many will try to crack Netflix's streaming now, this means the developers behind web crypto will be getting a lot of feedback and "bugs" to fix, and eventually make web crypto stronger, and maybe some day we can finally use it for e-mail and storage services.

gue5t• 13 years ago

This doesn't make sense, because you have to have the key to play the video. Cryptography and security practices are the medical science to DRM's snake oil, and I don't really expect this usage will help security at all.

A "known key" attack isn't an attack at all, cryptographically speaking.

In addition: it doesn't even look like they're meaningfully using "web crypto" APIs, but rather the much-debated proposed DRM blob APIs.

lukifer3• 13 years ago

I only know the basics of crypto, but couldn't the key be hidden and itself encrypted within the machine code for IE, and then authenticated via HTTPS? I would think this is mainly a problem for open-source browsers, which would require closed-source plugins.

ihsw• 13 years ago

One has to wonder whether asm.js will play a role in playing encrypted content in the browser. Surely decryption on the fly is feasible?

kcbanner• 13 years ago

I believe that web crypto is an API implemented natively in the browser, there will be no need to implement decryption in javascript.

tomphoolery• 13 years ago

Nice!! I've been holding out on downloading a new version of Silverlight because I heard this was just around the corner. Now I get to uninstall the last MS product on my machine!

Daiz7• 13 years ago

Now I get to uninstall the last MS product on my machine!

...Except you'd have to install Windows 8.1 and use IE11 in order to use the "wonderful" HTML5 Netflix with their proprietary DRM blob that has even less compatibility than Flash and Silverlight.

codereflection2• 13 years ago

This is interesting. Google still hasn't completely converted over to HTML5 video for YouTube. You've been able to opt in to the trial for years now (http://www.youtube.com/html5). But it seems that more than half the videos I watch are still using the crappy old Flash player.

Content wise, YouTube has way more content to convert to be able to take advantage of HTML5. I wonder if Netflix is having to convert video on the backend for this as well. Or if they're just using a base format that allows for delivery over Silverlight and HTML5 without having to re-encode and store. But they wouldn't really be re-encoding on the fly though, would they? That would seem to be hugely resource intensive. Does anyone know more about how they're doing this on the backend?

lloeki• 13 years ago

But it seems that more than half the videos I watch are still using the crappy old Flash player.

That's because of the ads. With things like ClickToFlash or youtube-dl, you notice that most videos are actually available as MPEG4 and/or WebM.

Daiz7• 13 years ago

The Flash player is playing the exact same H.264 video that you could get with the HTML5 player.

tracker12• 13 years ago

I'm guessing that older YouTube content may not have the source upload files available... some may be relatively poor quality, or not frequently watched. Re-encoding from the "flash" version of the videos would yield a worse result. Some of this may be from before Google bought YouTube. All speculation of course.

Daiz7• 13 years ago

I wonder if Netflix is having to convert video on the backend for this as well.

They won't. They're using H.264 video, which all major browsers can play in HTML5 <video> tags now. Not so sure how they'd handle stuff like multiple audio tracks though - as far as I know they're bit of an issue now even if muxed with the video, and if you don't want to load extra audio tracks then you're pretty much out of luck since there's no decent way to play video and audio separately in sync with HTML5 at the moment (a combination of <video> and <audio> isn't exactly that reliable for this).

driverdan• 13 years ago

Here's the EFF's formal objection to including DRM in HTML specs: https://www.eff.org/pages/drm/w3c-formal-objection-html-wg

shmerl• 13 years ago

Netflix was and remains DRMed, which is enough of a reason to avoid them.

lupinglade• 13 years ago

About time. Now if they only added some good movies...

ebbv2• 13 years ago

Nice Frank Lutz-ian reterming of HTML5 video DRM extensions as "premium extensions".

isomorphic3• 13 years ago

Netflix is indeed using some slippery and perhaps contradictory wording that has passed through at least one marketing filter.

Although we may interpret "premium" to connote "better", the usage meaning "something you have to pay" is accurate.

Perhaps we could take back the language and start referring to the extensions as "Media Fee Extensions"?

mtgx4• 13 years ago

I think it has nothing to do with being paid - it's not like you pay for the plugin itself. Plus, they wouldn't want you to think about having to pay for it anyway.

I think in this case it's just a meaningless word introduced to make it sound better than the "proprietary plugins" like Silverlight and Flash. I think their alternatives were naming it like "Awesome Viewing Experience Extension" or "Netflix True HD Vision Extension", or something like that.

In each case they wouldn't mean what they normally mean, and would be used in a misleading way just to give you a "good feeling" about having DRM on the web.

ck2• 13 years ago

This means netflix might finally come to the raspberry pi!

Far more exciting than IE11

Daiz7• 13 years ago

No, it won't. As far as compatibility goes, EME is even worse than something like Silverlight. This should be evident just from the fact that in order to use HTML5 Netflix, you either need a) IE11 on Windows 8.1 or b) an official Google Chromebook with Google-provided image and which hasn't been rooted. In comparison, even Silverlight has a pretty amazing track record as far as compatibility goes.

dstorey4• 13 years ago

EME, MSE, and Web Crypto are very new specifications. They’re just starting to be rolled out in browsers. They’re not going to be rolled out everywhere overnight.

H.264 video codec is on pretty much every major browser now, including Firefox. This wasn’t the case when browsers first supported the video element. It is a similar situation to EME and friends today. Including the potential licensing fee (I assume vendors have to licence the DRM module to plug into EME or get it from the underlying OS in the same way to how they have to licence H.264, but I'm not sure about this area)

downrightmike• 13 years ago

About effing time

dave1010uk• 13 years ago

Can we stop calling video that uses extensions "HTML5 video" (even if it may be part of the HTML spec)? I suggest we call it "EME video".

jebblue3• 13 years ago

Can you say you are supporting HTML5 if you just get in bed with Microsoft?

dstorey4• 13 years ago

I don‘t see why not. Two of the editors of the HTML5.1 spec are Microsoft representatives: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/

jebblue3• 13 years ago

If you have to say they will support HTML5 but only on xyz browsers or OS'es then it's like a gas station saying they support Regular but only for Ford and General Motors cars. The reason I can say that is any _other_ site that claims HTML5, works fine on my Chrome browser on Ubuntu.

jebblue3• 13 years ago

This works great on Linux, this is true HTML5 support (or they say it's HTML5 - and it works):

http://www.videojs.com/

adamconroy2• 13 years ago

As pointed out by many, this is even more proprietary than any plugin. Microsoft are fricken idiots, they are trying to be hip and open standards etc but nobody is going to buy it, at the same time they are annoying everyone who couldn't care less and probably don't even know what a plugin is, on top of disenfranchising legions of developers.

humbledrone• 13 years ago

You say nobody is going to buy it, but doesn't this article show that Netflix "bought" into it?

adamconroy2• 13 years ago

Sorry for the ambiguity. My intention was to communicate that I didn't think anyone would buy the idea that MS is hip and an open-standards advocate.

denibertovic• 13 years ago

there's really too much of this going on lately...i hate the path on which we are on....it's a slippery slope.

frankcaron• 13 years ago

I'm curious. With all the railing around Flash and its obsolescence, is Silverlight destined to go the same route?

I don't hear much about it anymore, particularly in the enterprise and the video provider space in which I currently work, where things like Verimatrix and Azuki are mentioned far more often than Flash/Silverlight.

Anyone have any intel on any major projects that use Silverlight aside from Netflix?

alanbyrne• 13 years ago

Does this mean it will now support Surround Sound?

Sonicmouse• 13 years ago

Exchange one crappy plugin for another... Way to innovate.

Netflix ditches Silverlight with support for HTML5 video in IE11

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