

Moonlight on Android - jstedfast
http://jeffreystedfast.blogspot.com/2011/04/moonlight-on-android.html

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SingAlong
For those of you (like me) who didn't know about Moonlight, it's an opensource
implementation of Silverlight <http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight>

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nuclear_eclipse
I wonder whether this would allow Netflix to more easily bring their streaming
video service to Android...

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aplusbi
Probably not. Moonlight doesn't have the DRM necessary (and won't - MS has no
intention of releasing it on Linux) and Netflix doesn't use Silverlight/MS DRM
on phones anyway (AFAIK).

From what I understand, on the iPhone/iPad Netflix uses the DRM built into the
device. Since Android phones are built by several different manufacturers
there is no uniformity in hardware DRM (and some phones don't have any at
all). I imagine that it's easier to get content providers to agree to use
hardware DRM than software DRM which further complicates the issue.

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jstedfast
Well, if that's the case (Netflix taking advantage of the DRM built into the
phones), then there's no reason Moonlight for Android can't take advantage of
that, too.

Also, Microsoft _has_ licensed their DRM for Linux on embedded devices in the
past.

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aplusbi
Yes, but since Netflix doesn't use Silverlight for the iPhone/iPad it's not
like it's going to make a difference one way or another.

MS has licensed their DRM, but they will not license it for use with
Moonlight. From my understanding, the licensing they have done has generally
for hardware (the NXP chip in the Roku box, for example).

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DjDarkman
I fail to see the point to this, Silverlight was deprecated by Microsoft in
favor of HTML5, end of story.

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jstedfast
Microsoft announced Silverlight 5 beta at Mix11, so not as dead as you'd like
to think it seems.

Silverlight is still also very heavily used for intranet apps (which is where
<http://www.telerik.com/> makes their money on Silverlight controls)

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kenjackson
Do you work for Telerik? Fan of their stuff.

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jstedfast
Nope, I work for Novell on Moonlight. The Telerik guys do seem like pretty
cool guys, though. I've emailed back and forth with one or two of them to try
and debug Telerik controls running on Moonlight.

