Amazon's Video on Demand venture is bracing itself for the imminent arrival of Netflix. The service is now undergoing a makeover. In
response to some advice from Hollywood, the company is planning to change its PC streaming setup. Amazon was told that Adobe's Flash platform is not secure enough and hence needs to be changed. And now, it seems almost certain that Flash is about to lose one of its few remaining supporters.
Paul Thompson, Project Manager with LoveFilm, said, "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. Simply put: without meeting their requirements, we'd suddenly have next-to-no films to stream online.”
However, LoveFilm is clearly bucking the trend. Where most of the companies are ditching Flash in favor of HTML5, LoveFilm will be adopting Silverlight platform instead. Silverlight belongs to Microsoft. The company said that HTML5 is still in the evolutionary stage and hence is very vulnerable at the moment. LoveFilm said, "There are simply no security protections available within HTML 5 that would allow us to stream content securely."
The transition would mean that LoveFilm service may no longer be available on non-Intel Macs. It may also not be available on Macs running on OS X 10.5 or lower. But the company has defended its moving saying, "Silverlight offers the best combination of security, quality and customer experience from a small number of available solutions, and the majority of our customers already have Silverlight installed.”