NFB admits MS Silverlight not ‘ideal’
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- The National Film Board of Canada came up with an amazing idea: let everyone see NFB films online!
It’s an online screening room and in a post, “You are just 30 seconds away from a new Internet TV Experience,” p2pnet said, following the link to the launch.
As an example of the kind of film you’d find, we cited ‘Kanehsatake 270 Years of Resistance,’ a two-hour 1993 documentary in which director Alanis Obomsawin, “endured 78 nerve-wracking days and nights filming the armed stand-off between the Mohawks, the Québec police and the Canadian army.”
But when we went to the National Film Board of Canada site for the online press conference, “We have detected that you do not have all the requirements to access the TVOS interface which requires the Microsoft Silverlight plug-in. Click the button below to install it, then refresh this page,”it said.
“Damn!” – said p2pnet, going on »»»
C’mon guys! Surely you could, at the very least, have used an open source application for your Canadian press conference to promote Canadian films to Canadians on your Canadian funded screening room designed specifically to allow not only Canadians, but Net users around the world, to watch 700 of your films for free online ?!
Forcing proprietary Microsoft stuff down people’s throats is a warped kind of censorship.
But not to worry. p2pnet reader Hook contacted the NFB and received this reply »»»
Thanks for your feedback.
Unfortunatly [sic], we had to go to an oustide [sic] service provider for this event and, althought [sic] we asked for it, they could not deliver other alternatives to silverlight.
We developped [sic] our site using a flash player to increase the accessibility and we agree that delivering the press conference using MS silverlight [sic] was not ideal.
We will make the event available on our site through the flash player early next week.
Stay tuned.
p2pnet – 700 free National Film Board movies online! January 22, 2009
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January 26th, 2009 at 10:38 am
good news.
Isn’t there some sort of flash p2p thing developed as well?
January 26th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Oh good, they’re going to trade one proprietary pile of junk for another.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:14 am
So let me get this straight: You asked the NFB to provide an open-source application because you didn’t want them forcing proprietary stuff down your throats, so they offered to provide an alternative written in Adobe’s proprietary Flash format?
Brilliant.
As far as “proprietary formats” go, at least Silverlight is based on well documented specs like XAML, CLR and JavaScript. That actually seems like the lesser of two evils to me.