Recently I participated in a panel on “Replacing Flash: Adaptive Streaming and DRM in HTML5”, presenting Bitmovin’s approach with the Bitmovin MPEG-DASH and HLS player to fully leverage the capabilities of HTML5 for high quality media streaming. This panel was organized and moderated by StreamingMedia.com’s well known streaming expert Jan Ozer at the Streaming Media East Show in New York.
W3C did a great job with the standardization of the HTML5 Media Source Extensions which enable adaptive bitrate streaming using MPEG-DASH natively in the browser without proprietary and in-performant plugins such as Flash or Silverlight, as well as the HTML5 Encrypted Media Extensions, which enable the usage of DRM-encrypted content using MPEG-CENC. This is a great example of how different standards and standardization organizations are working together to provide an open, company-independent and standardized ecosystem. This is also recognized by the industry. However, as good solutions are still rare, Bitmovin’s HTML5 Player has a perfect position on the market. And it’s the perfect time to switch to a HTML5-based player; especially for premium video providers with thought DRM requirements, as Google’s Chrome is removing Silverlight and thus the possibility to use Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM in Chrome (read more on this in my previous blog post: The Status of MPEG-DASH today and why YouTube and Netflix use it in HTML5).
In this talk, I presented customer deployments of the bitdash HTML5 player (now known as Bitmovin HTML5 Player), such as www.flimmit.com, www.kronehit.tv, www.sonostream.tv and www.genflix.co.id, who moved their streaming technology to the next level, to provide a superior experience for their customers – everything natively in HTML5 with no need for proprietary plugins like Flash or Silverlight. Out of these deployments, I shared insights on the used technologies for the different platforms to the industry experts:
| Platform | Used Player | Streaming | DRM |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chrome | Bitmovin Player using HTML5 MSE | MPEG-DASH | Widevine Modular |
| IE – Windows 8.1 | Bitmovin Player using HTML5 MSE | MPEG-DASH | PlayReady |
| IE – Windows 7 | Bitmovin Player using Flash / Silverlight | MPEG-DASH | ClearKey / PlayReady |
| Firefox | Bitmovin Player using Flash or HTML5 MSE | MPEG-DASH | Adobe / Widvine Modular |
| Safari | Bitmovin Player using HTML5 MSEbitdash using HTML5 HLS | MPEG-DASH / HLS | Fairplay HLS / AES HLS |
| Android – Web | Bitmovin Player using HTML5 MSEbitdash using HTML5 HLS | MPEG-DASH / HLS | Widevine Modular |
| Android – App | App using Googe’s Exoplayer | MPEG-DASH | Widevine Modular |
| iOS – Web | bitdash using HTML5 HLS | HLS | AES |
| iOS – App | Native HLS support | HLS | AES / Fairplay |
Check out the review of the session from StreamingMedia’s Paul Schmutzler at www.streamingmedia.com or watch the recording of the session on StreamingMedia’s YouTube Channel:
We hope these insights from our player deployments are interesting and useful for you. If you have more detailed questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thanks and best,
Stefan from the Bitmovin Team
Follow me on Twitter: @slederer
Follow Bitmovin on Twitter: @bitmovin
