Why? Even in this age where we know Flash is starting to lose ground to DOM-based solutions using HTML (sometimes 5 but not exclusively) combined with some slick coding or a framework (like jQuery), why do developers still end up falling back to Flash whenever animation or video is mentioned? Particularly with IE, why wouldn’t we fall back to Silverlight instead? I dunno, just seems like a more logical route to take.

From ZDNet

The discussion comes amidst an ongoing war of words between Apple and Adobe over over Apple’s refusal to support Flash Player on its iPad and iPhone devices. In April, for instance, Steve Jobs outlined his criticisms of the Flash development platform in a blog post.

In addition, this is not the first time Adobe has sent out a warning to users over an Apple update. In September, the company said that an Mac OS X update issued in August was shipping with a superceded version of Flash Player. It also noted that the Apple’s update was downgrading people with more recent versions of the player to the earlier edition.

That does not appear to be the case with this week’s Apple update, according to Adobe security response programme manager Wendy Poland.

I still can’t say that I am a Maconvert though Jen has me spinning the apples all over the house.  As a developer, I can’t say I’m in love with Flash either.  What I can say is that there are very specific rules that good web developers and designers abide by, one of which is that cross-domain requests are a very real and very scary threat.  Having taught a semester’s worth of web security and really digging into the issue of XSS, HTTP vulnerabilities and phishing schemes, and all the while developing Flash apps that have these apparent holes, it is easy to think that a malicious developer could easily design around this problem.  So kudos to Apple if in fact they really did fall back to plug up the problem.

I probably shouldn’t take sides.  Adobe has been well aware of the problem but it’s difficult at best to plug up every vulnerability across every platform out there.  Apple is doing what it can to protect its users.

So what’s the point?  The point is – be aware that there is a problem and that it is your responsibility (assuming you’re a developer) to cover it – not just the product makers.

With the Pwn2Own hacking contest coming up at Vancouver’s CanSecWest security conference later this month, Italian computer security blog OneITSecurity took some time to interview Charlie Miller. Miller, in case you’re not familiar, is a security expert who has won Pwn2Own two years running by hacking Apple’s Safari browser with incredible speed. Safari isn’t the only target — this year, all major browsers and a selection of mobile operating systems will serve as Pwn2Own challenges – but it’s fair to say that Miller knows a thing or two about keeping your browser secure.

Here are the highlights from Miller’s interview:

He thinks Windows 7 will prove more secure than OS X Snow Leopard this year, in part because it doesn’t have Java and Flash enabled by default. Windows’ full ASLR (address space layout randomization) also gives it a security advantage.

When asked what he thought would make the safest OS and browser combo, he opted for Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7, with no Flash installed, although “there probably isn’t enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about.”

For my money, the juiciest quote from the interview was “The main thing is not to install Flash!”

On the mobile side, Miller guessed that the iPhone 3GS would be more easily exploitable than the Motorola Droid, mainly because the iPhone’s been around longer, and has been subjected to more extensive security research.

You can check out Miller’s full answers (in English or Italian!) at OneITSecurity.

How NBC, NFL Will Stream Sunday Night Football

Web surfers will be able to watch only a fraction of NFL games in live streaming video this season, but those few games that the league will run online will offer several interactive features, including the ability to watch any play in slow motion.

The NFL and NBC Universal said today that they’ll offer live streaming video of NBC’s 17-game Sunday Night Football schedule on NBCSports.com and NFL.com.

After using Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE)’s Flash player to deliver games online last year, NBC is switching to Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)’s Silverlight platform for its football coverage.

NBC Sports senior vice president of digital media Perkins Miller said the network struck a broad deal with Microsoft to use Silverlight and its Smooth Streaming technology to deliver high-definition streaming video for its major sporting events, including the Olympics and Wimbledon.

Football fans will be able to toy around with several interactive features during the games on NFL.com and NBCSports.com, including four separate camera angles and a video player that offers full DVR functionality. Viewers that access the video streams in the middle of a game will even be able to rewind to plays that occurred before they opened their Web browsers.

One of the biggest additions to the streaming video feed this year is a “scrub bar” that will allow viewers to quickly navigate to the major plays of the game. NBC will integrate a data feed detailing each play into the scroll bar, so a viewer will be able to hover over an area on the scroll bar of the video window, and a marker will detail locations in the video where touchdowns and other major plays occur.

“We’re collecting the data feed that comes out of the stadium. We marry it to the video file. We can take a point in time, and create a visual marker for it on the player,” Miller explained.

NBC will rely on technical teams in several cities to deliver the interactive football games. In addition to teams that will be stationed in trucks near the stadiums at each Sunday night game, NBC staffers at its digital sports operation in Stamford, Conn., will cull video highlights from the game.

Perkins said NBC signed San Francisco-based Vertigo Software Inc. to write the code for a video player that hosts the Silverlight component. The network is also using the Uppercut video switching product from Los Angeles-based Reality Check Studios, and it signed iStreamPlanet Co. to encode video from all of the games.

While the games on NFL.com and NBCSports.com will allow those few viewers without access to a TV on Sunday nights to catch the games, Perkins says NBC expects that most of the traffic will come from football fans that are watching the games on TV.

“People use it as a complement to the broadcast. It enables them to have a control room at their coffee table,” Miller said, adding that he expects it to be popular with fantasy football fans and viewers that want to discuss plays with their friends.

NBC has a sales team dedicated to handling digital sales for the streaming NFL games and other online programming, and the network is also packaging online ads in broader deals with media buyers that buy spots during its TV broadcasts. Miller said NBC expects to generate online ad sales for football that will reach “seven figures.”

“It [online sales] is a fraction of what we’ll do on broadcast in terms of the revenue. We’ll do fairly well on this product,” he added.

Unfortunately for football fans, NBC will be the only NFL broadcaster to distribute games on the Web, as Fox Broadcasting Co. , CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS), and ESPN won’t have the rights required to stream games under their contracts with the league.

The NFL extended its TV and online rights deal this week with NBC, giving the network rights to broadcast Sunday nights on TV and online through 2013. The league already has rights deals with ESPN, CBS, and Fox to broadcast games through 2013, but those contracts don’t include rights to broadcast games online.

The Comments:

davisfreeberg
“Perkins Miller said the network struck a broad deal with Microsoft to use Silverlight and its Smooth Streaming technology to deliver high-definition streaming video for its major sporting events”

With the huge move towards user experience in the last 12 months or so, I’ve decided to change the class up a bit this time around. First, a new textbook – Measuring the User Experience by noted guru and researcher Tom Tullis. I think it might just be what we need to introduce more experience and less testing. Second, we’ll focus more on task accomplishment and user satisfaction in the past by using some pre-defined testing, sprinkled with a lot of web-based issues as opposed to general interface issues, and wrap that up nicely in a site building exercise designed to take what we’ve learned and applying it to a development.

I’m also continuing my support of WordPress by introducing it as the tool of choice for both blogging as well as general site development.

For those of you in the class, get ready for a hopefully fun, definitely challenging, and mostly a good learning experience with lots of information that I hope you take and reflect on every now and then. I have the benefit of 15 years of experience in the business – some good, some bad, a lot of great designs and experiences and a lot of bad ones too. It would be unfair to say that I hope you can live these experiences within the 3 short months of the course (or 6 if you count IMD345) but I certainly hope you can take from what I have learned and use it to your advantages.

That being said, I hope you all take a bit of time to check out some of the upcoming work that my team at iStream has been working on. Right now the prominent projects we have in the still include:

• A redesign of the iStreamPlanet corporate web site
• A launch of the iStreamPlanet Sales Portal
• The official release of iStream Director, a digital asset management system
• AT&T Blueroom Masters Golf Silverlight application with Move Networks technology
• Three interactive Silverlight applications to replace some existing Flash interfaces for a major broadcast network
• New Silverlight interfaces featuring Smooth Streaming
• A Flash video player featuring slow motion techniques for Ballpark Preps
• PlayReady digital rights management

And plenty more to come…

I first encountered Silverlight 2 years ago when it was first released at NAB as version 1 (the Javascript version).  Quickly iStream assimilated into the Silverlight army and helped push several products into the forefront with Silverlight 2 over the last year+ including several prominent public jobs and some to be released shortly.  Now, just 23 short months later, SL3 promises some great stuff.

For all those that say Flash still kicks SL in the ass, maybe true, but with a 10 year head-start I would’ve thought they’d still be leaps and bounds ahead.  The fact that SL is quickly catching up and becoming a prominent player especially in the business forefront says something about its acceptance and viability.  Don’t take me wrong, I too still develop plenty of Flash apps and here at iStream we take strides to develop interfaces concurrently on both platforms but the sheer speed at which SL has come to adolescence speaks volumes about what it may bring in the near future.

Stage 8H is best known as the place where Saturday Night Live is filmed. This week, though, it’s been turned into an ad-hoc data center as part of NBC’s efforts to stream thousands of hours of live Olympic coverage over the Internet.

Instead of the usual crop of comedians, NBC will have dozens of people watching every hour of the games, looking for highlights that it can chop up and make available on-demand. It’s just one piece of an elaborate arrangement that shuttles the events in Beijing back to the U.S.

From each of the dozens of Olympic venues, a high-definition video feed is delivered over fiber-optic cables to the International Broadcast Center that has been set up in Beijing. A bunch of encoders and Windows Media servers get the video into an Internet-ready format. From there, it travels via satellite to NBC’s headquarters in New York.

There, NBC actually adds a one-minute delay, allowing its cadre of live bloggers in Stamford, Conn., and elsewhere to write their text and have the video and commentary synchronized. Once ready, it goes from NBC to Limelight Networks, a content delivery network, which has 1,000 servers just for the live events sending the content to various Internet service providers, who then shuttle the content directly to their customers. (See chart below)

(Credit: Susan Dove/CNET News)

Making it play
Limelight Chief Strategy Officer Mike Gordon said his company is prepared for this to be the biggest live event the Internet has ever seen. “I would not be surprised at all to get 1 million viewers,” he said. “We’re certainly prepared for whatever the audience turns out to be.”

Mike Gordon, chief strategy officer, Limelight Networks

(Credit: Limelight Networks)

That said, there is clearly an element of risk in all this, considering NBC’s history of live Olympic streaming has been limited to broadcasting a single game, the gold medal ice hockey match in Torino, Italy, two years ago.

“NBC has always taken risks and is always trying to do more than it has in the past,” said Perkins Miller, the NBC senior vice president in charge of the Internet push. “It does keep me up at night when I think about streaming 2,200 hours (of live coverage).”

The massive effort has come together in a remarkably short amount of time. Microsoft’s deal to power NBCOlympics.com dates back only to January.

NBC had a pretty good idea what they wanted to do and had built some mock-ups of the player prior to deciding to partner with Microsoft.

Initially, they expected to use Adobe’s Flash, given that is the standard for video delivered over the Internet these days. But, as they began to hash things out with Microsoft during a series of all-day meetings at NBC’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza headquarters, Microsoft was able to show NBC some ways it could do more using its homegrown Silverlight technology.

Silverlight, Microsoft said, would be key to enabling NBC’s vision of a “control room” in which a viewer could watch multiple live streams at once.

Perkins Miller, senior vice president, NBC Universal

(Credit: NBC)

Even within Microsoft’s team, though, there was some apprehension of whether it was doable.

“Can we actually pull this off?” Senior Technical Evangelist Jason Suess recalled thinking. “Is the user’s machine going to be able to maintain four connections at one time?”

The key, Suess said in an interview at Microsoft headquarters last week, is using an approach known as adaptive streaming in which the player has the ability to customize the bit rate of the video stream based on a computer’s connection and processing power.

By Valentine’s Day, they were ready for a test. It was pretty important that the test work out, given that NBC was getting ready to crate up the gear to ship it off to Beijing.

“That was the first time the player came to life,” Suess said. “Obviously the player was extremely crude.”

Making it pay
One of the last pieces to fall into place was the advertising. Initially, NBC and Microsoft were hoping to be able to insert full video ads into the live streams, but doing so is tough work.

“You don’t have any way to pause a live stream,” Suess said. “Trying to deliver a video ad on top of that, you hit the limits of a user’s bandwidth.”

As of mid-April, they were still struggling with what to do and began considering that perhaps they would have to just rely on companion advertising around the video stream. Then they came up with an idea. Rather than insert full videos into the live streams, what if they stuck a display ad into the video, particularly during dead times in the action.

Jason Suess, senior technical evangelist, Microsoft

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)

That, approach, which is ultimately what’s being done, solved several issues. It was less bandwidth-intensive than video ads, but still got the advertiser directly in front of the viewer, all without interrupting any of the coverage. The amount of advertising will vary, Suess said; “It depends what is happening in the sports. We just wait for a dead space.”

By early May, NBC made the basic player available on the Internet, using a variety of prerecorded Olympic video, and by early June the enhanced Silverlight player was made public as well. The Olympic Trials, at the end of June, offered the companies and the public a chance for a test drive.

At this point, it’s come down to a triage of the few remaining known bugs. Each day, the bar is being raised in terms of what is a big enough deal to warrant such a late change. Suess, meanwhile, sent his wife and kids to visit family in New York so he could work 18-hour days.

In an interview last week, Suess said he had been at work until 1 a.m. the night before and gets in every morning by 8 a.m., so he can chat with the folks in Beijing before they sign off for the night.

“If I am not online and pushing things along, then I am introducing delay,” Suess said.

An admitted type-A personality, Suess is a stickler for organization–the kind of guy whose desk is always clean. (His wife would probably use the word “compulsive,” Suess said.)

Suess said he hopes things will be enough under control that he can actually watch some of the games, particularly sailing, of which he is a big fan. “I sure hope so,” he said. “When I got involved in this project, that was one of the reasons.”

To really get an idea of what abilities Silverlight has, admittedly you have to spend a lot of time with it.  A lot of time.  I am fortunate to have the resources and an extremely creative and knowledgeable staff who’ve pushed the limits of Silverlight pretty much as far as it will go.  Our long range goal is maybe best termed as RIA mashup – agnostic service digesters consuming APIs using component libraries to deliver not only rich internet applications but interactive and engaging as well.

I’m talking about being to openly swap back and forth between micro-blogging platforms (think Jaiku and Twitter and Tumblr), integrated messaging (Live, Yahoo, etc), alerts, mapping systems, and a variety of other needs all dumped into a flexible, web-based interface.  And then add on top of it that companies needing those systems can mix and match them in an easy to use (Silverlight driven) interface to create their own.  Without any coding.

NBC launched what I think (outside of the Silverlight.net site itself) is the best large-scale distribution of a Silverlight application example with its Olympics video site and be sure to try out the enhanced player. 

Sidenote – interesting blog post on mashable never even mentions the Silverlight platform though Silverlight can be distinctly used for mashups. In any case, I recommend reading the impact of the business of delivering Olympics coverage – with the event coming from China, there is an huge and distinct opportunity to use the Internet as an huge distribution mechanism and I think NBC is about to make some serious history with this. Though none of the features the NBC player demonstrates is new by any stretch of the imagination, remember the context.  Flash has been around since 1996, Silverlight since 2007.  Flash is a truly mature product, it has well over 96% penetration rate, runs on all platforms, blah blah blah.  And to be sure, I actually have nothing against Flash.  It does what it’s supposed to do and it does it well. 

But again, it’s had 12 years of practice.  Silverlight as a managed code platform has had less than 12 months.  And from working with it, it does have distinct advantages, most particularly where live video is concerned and one that will become increasingly evident as the Olympics progress, thanks in part to the NBC player.  In fact, I firmly believe (and pretty much know) that you will begin to see a proliferation of businesses begin using Silverlight, not to replace Flash but along side of it (a player we recently developed for example, has both SIlverlight and Flash components).

If you haven’t, I highly recommend taking a close look at it and it’s progression in the coming months.  Don’t discount it just because it has a Microsoft label and because it’s the new kid on the block.  There are some amazing changes headed our way.