It had to happen sometime: Microsoft announced…DRM is making its way onto the Silverlight platform, powered by none other than the company’s elusive PlayReady content access technology.
Silverlight, Microsoft’s cross-platform answer to Adobe’s Flash, was unveiled last year just two months after their PlayReady “cross platform” DRM was announced.
This announcement no doubt plays into NBC’s broadcasting of the 2008 Summer Olympics on its Web site through Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. For the 17-day event, the official site will broadcast an estimated 2,200 hours of programming with features such as event scheduling with pop-up reminders and picture-in-picture viewing.
Progress in technology led by Microsoft.
I was getting curious about Silverlight development… until now. DRM is suicide to any platform and company that opts for it.
Great, DRM’d also ran technology. I am so underwhelmed.
#1 Yea, it damn near killed iTunes.
Microsoft spent about a zillion dollars building DRM into the bone marrow of Vista – just in time for the world to walk away from DRM altogether.
DRM really gets me….
I’ve got a new HP “media center” desktop here. (The price was right.)
The DVR included works fairly well, although it was sort of Beta. (I think Vista SP1 or one of the other hotfixes helped there.)
So, I grab a movie, and want to burn it to a DVD to play on the big screen downstairs. Nope, it’s protected…. OK, I’ll play it on the notebook down there – it’s on the network – and use an S-Video cableset to put that on the big screen. Nada…. Protected…. (Both boxes using Vista.) Tried another machine – XP – won’t work…. Protected….
Media center my Aunt Susie….
So here I am, Stu Careful, trying to break the DRM on a file…. If I’d taped the thing on the old VCR, I could give copies to the neighbors…. (I don’t know if I could transfer them to a DVD or not [grin].)
I actually like Vista…. I’d have been happy to stick with XP, but got stuck with it. Another SP and it’ll be acceptable. But DRM….
Regards,
Stu.
I think the real loser here is MLB.com and that they lost so many viewers due to silverlight
Microsoft doesn’t want to me to use Silverlight; it won’t run on XP SP1 and I won’t install SP2.
Someday, they will learn what universal market share is like what Adobe does.
Not that I want Silverlight anyway.
I’ve been long convinced that Microsoft doesn’t have the expertise to do DRM right — almost no company does — so I’ll take a pass.
#5
Three letters – VLC. Probably won’t help the burn-to-disk problem, but it is a simple tool that allows you to view what you want, when you want, where you want. With the proper tools DRM in Vista becomes just another unused background service.
I’m looking forward to Silverlight 2, as I hope it could kick-start hobby programming again.
If the next release of the free Visual C# Express edition would support Silverlight targets, people could run other people’s home brew games and things without worrying about being malwared, as Silverlight would be a flash-esque sandbox.
Right now, I wouldn’t run someone else’s program unless I both trusted them *and* I trusted them to not get malwared. Back in the 8 bit era with floppy disks etc, malware wasn’t an issue in the same way.
Forget the DRM, and Silverlight right along with it. Silverlight is trash. I watch baseball through MLB.com, which started using Silverlight this season. Ugh.. The video quality resembles a slide show, and each sound is bracketed with mechanical hiccup sounds.
At least it makes Flash look like a quality product. That’s something.
Big surprise, I’m just glad the folks there at MS are this clueless. Couple of more years of bad decisions and maybe, just maybe the competition will return.
While it is easy for me to say “no thanks”, there are millions of plebeians out there that won’t care about DRM.
I’d just like to point out that the DRM has most likely been a request of all the companies that offer video and audio content. The Silverlight team was just getting DRM in their because their customers are asking for it. Sure as an end user of the media it’s lame. Personally I don’t like DRM at all. I do like Silverlight as a technology. I think it’s a whole bunch better then developing for Flash. I’ve been working with Flash since it was Future Splash way back when. Even with all that experience, I’ve found Silverlight to fantastic for development.
I am curious about the poster above who was experience bad video quality. I haven’t had that experience, but I would like to learn more about why it’s not working for them.