[cbryan]

I'm wondering what technology Netflix is going to use to stream video to their app and how they're going to address studio's security concerns. IIRC, they were using Silverlight because it supported some encryption scheme that made everyone happy.

Hm, looks like Silverlight can run on the iPhone: http://mashable.com/2009/11/27/silverlight-iphone/

[mortenjorck]

Whoa, what? From the article:

What’s even more interesting is that this wasn’t a skunkworks proof-of-concept project, Microsoft got the OK from Apple. This is in stark-contrast to Apple’s stance on Adobe Flash, which currently has plans for all mobile platforms except for the iPhone.

So according to Mashable, Apple is indeed allowing a runtime environment, running interpreted code on the iPhone, in direct contravention of the SDK guidelines (unlike Flash CS5, which is compiling native IPA binaries with nothing interpreted at runtime). Very weird.

[wfarr]

"Then, using HTML 5’s <video> tag, Silverlight is able to communicate a QuickTime request to the IIS server, which then decodes the MPEG-2 v8 file dynamically and starts streaming it to the iPhone.

This is extremely similar to how YouTube content currently works with the iPhone. Because Silverlight already supports GPU acceleration (a feature that is coming to future versions of Flash Player 10), battery life and overall performance has the potential to be quite strong."

Also from the article.

[danudey]

There was an article about this a while back (whose link I can't find).

Microsoft's Silverlight-to-iPhone streaming is basically 'Microsoft implemented in IIS Streaming Server a streaming standard the iPhone already supports'. It doesn't require any approval from Apple. It's just streaming h.264 over HTTP.

[wmf]

This is something called Silverlight that is totally different from Silverlight.

Netflix could have built their own DRM system that runs on the iPad, but I'm guessing they just used RDF to distract and confuse the studios.

[PanMan]

Nope. Only silverlight video streaming works on the iphone. They implemented Apple's http video protocol on the server side. Doesn't need Apple's permission for that. You can't run actual silverlight apps on the iPhone.