LOVEFiLM made to leave Flash for Silverlight
December 2, 2011
UK on-demand streaming player LOVEFiLM has confirmed it will stop showing movies in Flash and will instead deploy Microsoft’s Silverlight platform after coming under pressure from Hollywood to utilise a more secure platform.
“We’ve been asked to make this change by the studios who provide us with the films in the first place, because they’re insisting – understandably – that we use robust security to protect their films from piracy, and they see the Silverlight software as more secure than Flash,” said Paul Thompson, streaming project manager at LOVEFiLM in the company’s blog.
“Simply put: without meeting their requirements, we’d suddenly have next-to-no films to stream online.”
Thompson said the change will affect or apply to PS3, iPad, Internet TVs, PCs, laptops and Macs.
“And very regrettably, Silverlight software is not supported on non-Intel Macs (those with an operating system of 10.5 or lower) or on computers using the Linux/UNIX operating systems. In fact, none of the solutions available to us allowed secure streaming to Linux users,” Thompson added.