Yeah, there wasn't some magic point where it started. It was probably the first big worms when the mass audience became aware of the threat.

I was a callow MacOS 9 hipster video nerd back then, so it wasn't something I was that focused on myself.

Yep, pretty much any OS is going to get at least one security patch a month, it seems. And it's a lot harder to harden after the fact than it is to have security a clear focus and mandate before the first dry-erase marker hits whiteboard. Plus we have the benefit of the scarred veterans of many exploits to help us avoid making old mistakes with new products.

Sure. Nothing is ever provably secure. But code heritage matters, and so does track record. It's no guarnatee of future security, but it's something.

Yep. It's always a matter of relative security versus importance of features. If users are going to be watching vidoe in browsers, the question is Silverlight's relative security compared to other plugins, players, and now browsers available. Comparing both architectural design and breech history between those is probably useful.

Er, no, they aren't.

QuickTime Media Layer back in the day did some of those, but tool development was abandoned after Jobs came back to Apple, and client-side support for interactive features have slowly been dropped for security reasons.

QTSS/DSS are actually pretty bad choices for long-form on-demand content delivery, due to the lack of bandwidth negotiation.

Well, first lets start with a feature request.

Do you think the Linux community would be okay with us integrating DRM support into the downloadable codec pack? It seems like the kind of thing we're going to get yelled at about one way or another :).

Yep, right there in my email address.

My blog: http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg

For about 3.5 years now, I'd hit the karma cap here will before then :).

Yep, when it comes to Hollywood content DRM is a contractual obligation.

The stuff that we publish in Smooth Streaming ourselves rarely uses DRM, but that's not an option for Netflix.

You're getting stuttering with this player? What's your connection speed and system specs? Where are you located?

These should be fine as long as you can sustain 300 Kbps or higher.

Or did you just mean that internet video stutters for you in general?

It would be lovely to live in a world where historical physics lectures where the killer app to drive installs, but I doubt they'll make a material impact on installed base :).

Silverlight's already on more than a third of internet-connected devices, so it'd take tens of millions of ne installs for any single site to make a significant market share bump .

These are actually Smooth Streaming files.

http://www.iis.net/extensions/SmoothStreaming

FWIW, Silverlight 3 supports WMV, MPEG-4 (with H.264), Smooth Streaming, and supports managed code decoders and parsers to add additional formats.

What else would you use if you wanted to do cost-effective live HD streaming?

Media companies who use Silverlight are mainly using it to do stuff there aren't any other ways to do.

We're seeing a huge amount of live sports projects using Silverlight, because nothing else can deliver the same experience economically.

Her's a bunch of high-profile projects: http://team.silverlight.net/

Becase more context makes it easier to learn and retain the information, and to explore further in topics of interest?

This is web video; we should offer more than VHS interactivity and richness.

Well, here's an actually serious question.

What kind of DRM implementation would the Linux community accept in Moonlight?

2000 or so? Probably when always-on broadband become common.

Certainly XP as released was way too trusting. But I think Microsoft's track record has been quite positive since XPSP2. I wasn't around for that period, but it definitely got people VERY focused on security as something that has to be baked into product design from the inception of the product. Vista, IE 7/8, Silverlight, Office 2003/2007 all have had much better security records than their predecessors.

Lots of complaints about Microsoft products, most notably Vista, are on areas where Microsoft prioritized security over simplicity or backwards compatibility. And that's a problem for everybody, including Mac and Linux, with years of regular security updates ahead of us.

It's been easier in Silverlight since there wasn't anything to be backwards comaptible to. But there are defintley features that have been cut, delayed, or reduced in scope due to the test cost of verifying security. Every feature gets a threat model and security test plan before it gets approved.

We're really serious about it. On the media side, for example, there's a lot of fuzz testing of malformed bitstreams to make sure there's no way to cause a crash that could then lead to an exploit.

Check out some links to the player in action. It does a whole lot of stuff that MPlayer can't.

It's really more like a Blu-ray or Director style media playback application. It's not just a rectangle with some codecs.

Sure it can. Check out the player experience, and its navigation, commentary, captioning, etcetera. And it uses Smooth Streaming to provide proxy-cachable video at multiple bitrates.

http://alexzambelli.com/blog/2009/03/27/smooth-streaming-white-paper/

FWIW, Silverlight so far has had 0 exploits over three versions. It's done well compared to other media players in the same period. One advantage of a relatively recent technology is that it was designed for security from the get-go, after the web had shifted to its current "presumed hostile" state.

What browser do you use?

Also, if you look at the design of the video experience, it really couldn't be done without Silverlight. This isn't just a simple video player, but with integrated captions, commentary, graphical links, and delivered via Smooth Streaming.

It's really a media player app using Silverlight as the runtime; there's certainly many thousands lines of source for the managed code driving that experience.