Please stop using Microsoft Silverlight, says, err, Microsoft

Are you listening BT and Now TV? Even Microsoft thinks you should stop using it

Microsoft has urged organisations still using Silverlight, the company's video content delivery system, to cease and desist, and to use HTML 5 instead.

The plea - no doubt following a forlorn attempt to watch BT Sport or Now TV - was made in a blog post by the Microsoft Edge team, which is working on the company's next-generation web browser to replace the long-in-the-tooth Internet Explorer web browser.

"The commercial media industry is undergoing a major transition as content providers move away from proprietary web plug-in based delivery mechanisms (such as Flash or Silverlight), and replace them with unified plug-in free video players that are based on HTML5 specifications and commercial media encoding capabilities," they write in a blog posting published today.

Instead of supporting plug-ins from the Web 2.0 era, Microsoft has promised to support open web standards, particularly now that HTML 5.0 has finally become an agreed specification.

In particular, Microsoft Edge will support the W3C's Media Source Extensions for adaptive streaming and Encrypted Media Extensions for content protection. The latter was a source of contention among the digital rights management (DRM) fundamentalists at the organisation, who opposed strong DRM being built into HTML standards for fear that they might be misused.

Through its membership of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), Microsoft is also supporting the DASH and Common Encryption (CENC) standards. "These specs were designed and developed to enable interoperable streaming to a variety of media platforms and devices."

As cross-platform, interoperable standards they ought to cut the cost of supporting protected streaming video running on different browsers and different platforms. Silverlight no long works on Chrome, nor was it ever ported to Linux.

"By focusing on interoperable solutions, content providers are able to reduce costs and at the same time users are able to access the content they want on the device they prefer using the app or web browser of their choice," claims Microsoft.

The blog concludes: "We encourage companies that are using Silverlight for media to begin the transition to DASH/MSE/CENC/EME based designs and to follow a single, DRM-interoperable encoding work flow enabled by CENC. This represents the most broadly interoperable solution across browsers, platforms, content and devices going forward."

Hopefully, that message will be heard loud and clear at BT, as well as Sky, which is responsible for Now TV.