Microsoft adds video offering to Office 365. Oh NOES, you'll need Adobe Flash

Microsoft has added a video portal to Office 365, enabling users to upload and share videos. The service will be in preview soon, and available to all customers with the right kind of subscription in early 2015. So what is the point, when YouTube does this so well? The idea is to manage internal videos with permissions based …

[Anonymous Coward]

Why Flash?

Is Silverlight dead?

[Pirate Dave]

Re: Why Flash?

I wondered the same thing - talk about not eating your own dog food...

Is Netflix still reliant on Silverlight or have they gone to something else?

[ThomH]

Re: Why Flash?

Netflix is now available via the HTML5 premium video extensions — most controversially the encrypted media extensions which either (a) seek to corrupt the aim of open standards to allow consumption anywhere; or (b) accept that DRM is the trade-off for some content access and try to make it less vendor-dependant. Depending on where you sit.

If you're accessing Netflix through a browser and your browser isn't IE11/Windows 8.1 or Safari/OS X v10.10 then, yes, it's still Silverlight powered.

But I think a huge proportion of access is now probably tablets, TVs with native clients, set-top boxes, video game consoles, etc, etc, etc. Not Silverlight places.

[Zippy's Sausage Factory]

Re: Why Flash?

Silverlight has been pretty much on life support for years. They only really keep it going because the film studios like it and mandate it for Netflix, LoveFilm and so on. Ironically, it's not very good at video - but it is quite good at DRM.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Slitherlight

If what you say is correct why does the Updater on more than one Server 2012 System I use keep offering it as an optional update?

Do I want to play videos on a DB server? No I don't.

Getting tired of hiding it almost every week. Why can't I set something so that for this, it is regarded as...

'Never ever try to install this POS on this system again or I'll kneecap you Got it!'

[Pascal Monett]

Re: "Ironically, it's not very good at video - but it is quite good at DRM."

Not ironic at all, that was part of the specs from the start.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's the coverage of the Azure outage?

Where's the coverage of the Azure outage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where's the coverage of the Azure outage?

Try the Azure service outage page http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/

Apparently it happened 19 minutes ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where's the coverage of the Azure outage?

"Apparently it happened 19 minutes ago."

That would appear to be an AM/PM muxip; according to the times in the eventual report here, it fell over at 1AM, whereas the "19 minutes ago" you mention would tie in nicely with 1PM.

[Dan 55]

They're waiting till HTML5 video is fully supported in IE

Sometime around 2020.

[channel extended]

Security?

As MS and Adobe are both crap at security, how long will it be before simply watching one of these videos gets you infected?

[king of foo]

Re: Security?

Ebola goes optical...

[P. Lee]

Re: Security?

On the basis that no-one could be that bad at coding video codecs when its your main job, I suspect the frequent updates are a marketing ploy.

[Yorkshen]

Flash - The best thing out there actually.

Actually the only plugin aside of Unity which I consider "The best thing happened" to Web is Flash.

Flash offer today the best web based game performance/ Video streaming / Quality of product and Enterprise class Web applications - based on Flex Framework.

In a simple comparing test with 100,000,000 items to be shown with custom look on a simple page - Flash / Flex beat the best HTML5 up-to-date JavaScript mess's with about 100 up to 2000 TIMES higher performance. At some configurations even the HTML5 fails to load, which it is always loading for Flash.

Checking on mobiles - Adobe Flash - AS3 is the REAL CROSS-PLATFORM Single codebase with high performance, same looking - Code Once - run everywhere programming language out there.

It is run on all current devices, all browsers, and it is capable of running on practically everything where Quality, Performance and Great Look means something.

Adobe Flash is actually THE ONLY CUTTING EDGE PLATFORM currently available worldwide.

I am strongly behind Microsoft for union with it on all of it's products. Because Microsoft is targeting the same targets with Windows. Go Microsoft! Adobe is the way! :)