RSSMicrosoft 'worked with Apple' for Silverlight on iPhone, says Goldfarb
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published November 25, 2009, 4:37 PM
It was an impressive demonstration, once they got it working: H.264 video streaming wirelessly (and slowly, at least during the caching sequence) using Microsoft's Silverlight video streaming, to an Apple iPhone. It's all the more impressive when you realize that Flash video still has not made its way (permanently) to the iPhone, not for any technical reasons we know of...simply because Apple wants to control the video channel for streaming media to its devices.
And yet here it is, a Microsoft stream. You'd think Apple would have stood firm against Microsoft at least as aggressively as it has against Adobe, if not more so. How did this happen? We asked Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb last week at PDC 2009, and the answer was a huge surprise...followed by some caveats. But it contained these four amazing words: "We worked with Apple."
"The promise of Silverlight is that it's a cross-device, cross-browser, cross-platform solution, and it works the same on Macs as it does on Windows," Goldfarb responded. "The iPhone is a unique scenario. We talked to our customers...and they said, 'Look, we just need to get our content there, and it's mainly in the media space like broadcasting, and we want to put it on the iPhone.' They have a great solution for that; if you're surfing the Web, and hit YouTube and hit 'Play,' it'll play your video because they've created an environment where they can safely play media, and they're comfortable with that.
"So we've worked with Apple to create a server-side based solution with IIS Media Services," Goldfarb continued, "and what we're doing is taking content that's encoded for smooth streaming and enabling the content owner to say, 'I want to enable the iPhone.' The server will dynamically make the content work -- same content, same point of origin -- on the iPhone. We do this with the HTML 5 <VIDEO> tag, in many ways."
Goldfarb showed a standard HTML page where the <VIDEO> tag is embedded, linking to a familiar "Big Buck Bunny" animation that Microsoft has used before in demos. That video is located on an IIS server that now knows how to respond to a request from a QuickTime playback system. "We're translating the content to support the MPEG2 v8 [decoder] format [of] the iPhone; we're moving it to their adaptive streaming format. So it's the same IIS smooth streaming content, the same server, the same point of origin, but now I can get that content to play without any code changes, without any real work, on the iPhone. That's the critical thing for our customers."
What did it mean to "work with Apple," I asked Goldfarb. As it turns out, it's a little lopsided: "We did all the work," he responded. "We just made sure Apple was comfortable with it. We have to have a strong partnership with our partners, we have to have trust, and that's key."
From there, Goldfarb could not go into much further detail, but the extent of the achievement could present interesting lessons for others who have been endeavoring to "work with Apple" over the years: Apparently Microsoft didn't spend most of its energy talking about it, negotiating, and making its point. It simply made the technology work first, and Apple said OK.
When Silverlight first started out, it was intended to be a programming platform that extended .NET into the cross-platform realm of Web apps, by way of the browser. To give Silverlight a bigger push, Microsoft incorporated more video capabilities into it last year, with the result being a strong contender against Flash. Now the marketing effort is coming full circle, with the company now re-emphasizing its programmability, to maintain a par against AIR and keep active on both fronts in the battle against Adobe.
In its guise as a media platform over the past few years, Goldfarb admitted to us that Silverlight "has gotten pigeon-holed in many ways, because of just the way the features came together. It was a sequencing and a timing thing. I don't look at that as a bad thing; I look at is as, what are the requirements for a software platform? It needs to be ubiquitous. That's a great way to reach into the consumer space; what we've done in media is absolutely a critical part of our strategy. And we've executed on it flawlessly. Now with the business features coming in printing, bi-di, all the language support, the accessibility, the rich data access, the networking...you really do get that level of rich business applications that's required."
Goldfarb here was referring to Silverlight 4's upcoming support for functionality that extends beyond the traditional security sandbox -- another dangerous pigeon-hole for plug-in developers. For a real, business-class Web app to be considered legitimate, it needs to print. That means it needs access to the printer beyond what the browser can provide.
This gets into the whole area of where the security boundary lies, and who gets to marshal it -- Silverlight or the browser. Earlier in the week, Microsoft President Bob Muglia told Betanews he believed the browser would always provide some sort of basic, standardized security context. But Muglia left open the possibility that Silverlight, or something like it, would push the boundaries of that context.
As long as the browser provides the basic sandbox, the level of vulnerability for any future Silverlight 4 Web app will be determined by the weakest browser. I asked Brian Goldfarb, does this present an argument in favor of Silverlight providing its own security context, over and above the browser? "You're welcome to make any argument you'd like," Goldfarb responded at first, his face showing some signs of sweat. After he collected his thoughts, he proceeded with a more thorough response: "We've been through rounds and rounds of this, and we've tightened it up, and we think the sandbox that's generated by the browser is the most secure place to run software. It's not perfect, but it's the best...The majority of applications today are all inside the sandbox, even the out-of-browser applications. What we've done with [Silverlight] 4 is extend the sandbox space by giving more features in that secure zone -- drag-and-drop, all the things our customers have demanded -- and now we're creating a Trusted Application model, which is more like regular software, where you need to have a trust relationship with who you're installing it from. You wouldn't go to www.hackmysite.com and install some .EXE, but you'd feel pretty comfortable going to the NBA or to Betanews, or whomever you have a trust relationship with."
What about Google Chrome, then? Can Microsoft trust Chrome the way it would trust Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox to establish the trust framework? "It's a browser, like any other browser," Goldfarb responded.
Are you kidding me?
Mr. Scott M. Fulton, III, how the heck can you actually say that this is Silverlight running on the iPhone?
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|I'll repeat myself:
"This article = big smelly pile of BS."
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|No, Microsoft did nothing special except make a webpage. Nothing to do with silverlight. Adobe could quite happily do the same...
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|One more time (this is fun!)
"This article = big smelly pile of BS."
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|Doesnt MS own 1/3 of apple via stock?
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|OK, since this is so commonly mis-reported, MS never owned 1/3 of Apple. They did purchase non-voting stock, which they sold for a nice profit 3 years later. MS has NO influence on the direction of Apple engineering, through I'm sure they do work together on projects that are mutually beneficial (video streaming on iPhone, Exchange support in iPhone and Snow Leopard, etc..)
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|iconara is the only smart guy here who picked up on the "eyeball grabbing false headline". Guess it was a slow week... This is about the lamest excuse to get another bogus Silverlight article I've ever seen. The iPhone cannot play even 0.01% of Silverlight content once you get to the bottom line. This article = big smelly pile of BS.
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|LOLZ. Yeah, I realize this is a 'snub Adobe' article, especially about concepts such as 'cooperation' and 'trust'.. lots and lots of TRUST, since there's none of that between Adobe and Apple at this point.
But seriously: Adobe done got PUNKED. Client side, server side, who cares? It. Got. Done.
Apple doesn't get their platform diddled with by some buggy plugin that they don't wanna track, and MSFT gets to sell a solution that keeps the content firmly in the control of the creator. On the serverside.
You'd think that Adobe would sex up their 'Flash Media Server' but.. what? Adobe has one of those? New to the entire world. Guess marketing has some work to do.
Honest to gollyGolly, you'd think that ADBE would have some clue with SAAS, and the whole app on a webpage dot com, and all the other fluff on their website but noooo.
That's okay, seems MSFT *does* have the clue and now Silverlight content will exist. On everyone's iPhone.
Meanwhile, Adobe tries to compile Flash into ARM compliant code. Good luck with that, they can't even get local policy right in Actionscript:
http://mindtaker.blogspo...ound-adobe-says-no.html
First you have to walk.. badly? Before you can even run.
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|..and I *hope* you guys didn't miss the 2nd to the last paragraph where MSFT seems to have put a *some* of thought into user space of their plugin.. so that GIFAR type attacks don't happen (that's what the PM was calling out).
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|"Microsoft's Silverlight video streaming" is the brand name of a server side on-the-fly video encoding system.
HTML5 is a technology that Safari supports.
the <video> tag is an HTML 5 tag that on Safari, is capable of playing back H.264 video.
Whomever wrote this article needs to learn what research is.
Adobe have their "Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server", guess what? This can stream H.264 video that is playable in Safari's HTML5 <video> tag.
So by the author's dodgy logic, you've been able to do Flash on an iPhone since iPhoneOS v3...
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|Microsoft is part owner of Apple, while Adobe is not. Adobe's only hope Android.
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|Here we go again.
Microsoft bought $150 million in Apple stock over a decade ago and sold it at a profit years later. No, Microsoft does not own a piece of Apple, although they use Apple as their R&D labs.
Second, Apple had several Billion dollars in cash in the bank when Microsoft bought that stock. Microsoft didn't "save" Apple with that stock sale. $150 million was a drop in the bucket. Apple had enough cash where they could have stopped selling anything and still stayed open for several years.
The bigger story everyone forgets is that Microsoft agreed to continue making Office for Mac which, at the time, was a measure of any platform's viability. The entire transaction was settlement for Microsoft using technologies from Apple without a license. Microsoft got away cheap and Apple was allowed to develop to where it is today.
"Adobe's only hope Android." made me think "Help me Adobe-Won-Kenobi, you're my only hope"
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|The server will dynamically make the content work -- same content, same point of origin -- on the iPhone. We do this with the HTML 5 tag, in many ways."
"We're translating the content to support the MPEG2 v8 [decoder] format [of] the iPhone; we're moving it to their adaptive streaming format."
So, Microsoft are adapting to service Apple. Talk about the Borg (as Microsoft are often known) changing.
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|Thanks for this article it was geat :D
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|You say "Flash video still has not made its way (permanently) to the iPhone, not for any technical reasons we know of...simply because Apple wants to control the video channel for streaming media to its devices." which is not quite true,
Apple simply says "it's App Store's job to install / remove software on the iPhone" not Flash's. Flash should mind its own business - do multimedia and not mess up with the OS (and eventually in some cases - crash it).
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|No, actually it's technical reasons:
http://mindtaker.blogspo...ple-to-adobe-lousy.html
Adobe has been whining that Apple doesn't 'open their APIs' when other *open source* browser plugin devs have no problems. It's simply that Adobe has lost their Mac / Unix chops, probably in the last layoff.
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|Are you paid by Microsoft to write this nonsense?
Microsoft has not managed to get Silverlight running on the iPhone. In fact, Silverlight doesn't have anything to do with what they are talking about, they just want to get the brand mentioned in the same sentence as "iPhone", because that will make it look good in comparison to Flash.
So they stream video to the iPhone, oh, fantastic, YouTube does that too, and thousands of other sites. How do they do it? With IIS, their web server software. Just like YouTube does with whatever threy are using, and thousands others do with Apache, Nginx, or whatever.
Microsoft may do some adaptive streaming or whatnot, but where does Silverlight, the browser plug in come in to the picture? It sure as hell isn't running on the iPhone.
Come on, please do some fact checking before you swallow the PR people's story lock stock. They are just using you.
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|Fact checking:
- IIS7 converts their native format to iPhone compatible video.
- IIS7 media services converts the smooth streaming technology into adaptive streaming, in order to make it run well no matter what your bandwidth is.
- Silverlight 4 is able to host and control the HTML5 video tag inside it.
Conclusion: Silverlight can play and control the playback of video in the iPhone.
Are those good enough facts for you?
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|But they're still just streaming H.264 video to an iPhone, just like YouTube does. Where does Silverlight, the browser plug in and dynamic language runtime come in to the picture? Apple still disallows interpreted code on the iPhone, and nothing in this article says anything about any exceptions to that.
The article just says that they are streaming video to a HTML5 video tag, and if you look at the page mentioned (http://www.iis.net/iphone), it contains nothing but a video tag. No Silverlight.
It doesn't matter if Silverlight too can display that video using a video tag, because it doesn't run on the iPhone, and that's what this article is claiming.
And it's just pathetic when they say that "they worked with Apple", when they later admit that they more or less just made Apple aware of what they're doing.
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|"Silverlight 4 is able to host and control the HTML5 video tag inside it"
No, that's iPhoneOS 3's version of Safari, nothing to do with silverlight
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|You really need to learn how to read. It's being hosted on the SERVERSIDE. Please wrap your arms around that concept. Safari is interacting with the SERVER. What's your point?
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|I don't know, are you paid by Adobe to counter-shill? You're being deliberately thick about a Silverlight MEDIA PLUGIN for IIS.
I really don't care HOW they do as long as they keep plugins out of MY IPHONE. I'm sorry that the fact that they brand it 'Silverlight' makes your brain fart. Everyone else gets it.
Sounds like professional jealously to me that some buggy plugin vendor zigged and got it wrong while MSFT *zagged* and got it right. Your name wouldn't be Dowdell would it?
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|Fact checking:
- IIS7 converts their native format to iPhone compatible video.
- IIS7 media services converts the smooth streaming technology into adaptive streaming, in order to make it run well no matter what your bandwidth is.
- Silverlight 4 is able to host and control the HTML5 video tag inside it.
Conclusion: iPhone can control IIS7 by getting the video format it asks for instead of proprietary silverlight crap.
fixed that for you...
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|Note that Flash video encoded in h.264 can also play on the iPhone using the HTML5 tag. It just can't play inside the Flash Player, just as the mentioned Silverlight example isn't playing inside of the Silverlight plugin on the iPhone. As Apple is all for developers pushing video to the iPhone via the video tag and doesn't care where that video originated from.
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|Note that the video in the demo *IS* playing inside the Silverlight plugin, because Silverlight 4 can host the HTML5 video tag inside it and control the playback from the plugin code, unlike Flash.
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|I think you've mixed up two things: yes, Silverlight can play video using a HTML5 video tag, and yes the iPhone can play video using a HTML5 video tag. That does not mean that Silverlight can play video *on* an iPhone. Silverlight is not and will not be available as a browser plugin on the iPhone for the same reasons that Flash Player isn't. The demo isn't playing in Silverligt on iPhone, it's playing in Quicktime.
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|Both wrong. If silverlight requires a rendering engine it uses Trident (the IE8 engine) and cannot therefore understand HTML5, unlike Adobe Air/Flex which use Webkit and can...
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|And iPhone users don't WANT a 'browser plugin' like crash.Flash on their iPhone. You're missing the point. The most important thing is NOT the tech, but the fact that Silverlight content is being rendered with Apple core tech.
MSFT came up with a solution that was cool with Apple and Adobe didn't. MSFT seems to understand something ADBE doesn't. The concepts of 'client' and 'server'. And 'elegant' over 'ubiquitous.'
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|Impressive what you get for a few million dollars to a struggling company a few years ago. As opposed to if you're a software maker that competes directly with Apples core platform addons that they give away free to make their platform seem more compelling.
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|Wtf?
"We're translating the content to support the MPEG2 v8 [decoder] format that the iPhone format; we're moving it to their adaptive streaming format. So it's the same IIS smooth streaming content...
can someone explain that quote to me? Or did someone fat finger a quote?
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|The meaning of this quote is, as I understand it:
- iPhone supports MPEG8 v8 content.
- Apple owns the adaptive streaming format.
- Microsoft owns the smooth streaming format, which is similar.
- Microsoft created server-side code in IIS7 that converts smooth streaming format into Apple's adaptive streaming format so that it can be delivered to the iPhone and played by Silverlight using the HTML hosting features.
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|THANK YOU. Somebody gets it.
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|I am so impressed w/ever note so far. really pro stuff. thanks folks
Thank you very much for the great information. http://ellumobile.blogspot.com
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|commission must impose fines or other sanctions against those who may have violated rules.iphone crowds
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|Mobile Netflix soon?
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|"When Silverlight first started out, it was intended to be a programming platform that extended .NET into the cross-platform realm of Web apps, by way of the browser. To give Silverlight a bigger push, Microsoft incorporated more video capabilities into it last year, with the result being a strong contender against Flash."
Yes and No...
It was designed to bring the WPF portion of .NET to browsers, but version 1.0 was heavily focused on Video Streaming and basic WPF constructs.
Video was actually the 1.0 primary release features. Microsoft wanted a solid solution for streaming WMV/VC1 content to browsers and that took priority over WPF API features.
The added Video features to 3.0 and 4.0 are just extra features, not a focus on Video, as the new Video features basically only add in support for alternative codecs, HTML5, and some additional processing.
The core Silverlight Video multi-bit streaming and WMV/VC1 codec delivery that is shoving out 1080p on Zune and 720p on Netflix is for the most part the same and has been doing this for a couple of years now.
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|It is going to be interesting to see the actions of Google and Apple in the Video space - http://madhusudanrao.wor.../11/26/google-and-adobe/
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|The fact of the matter is that now MS has a viable way to push Silverlight content to iPhones..and Adobe does not. Rumor has it that ADBE has some type of 'Flash Media Server' but I've never seen one prominently mentioned.
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|