This fall we will see yet another tightening of the Flash restrictions imposed by popular browsers. As promised, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari will be taking the next step toward a plugin-free browsing experience. Safari 10 will, by default, behave as if Flash isn’t installed at all. Silverlight, Microsoft’s Flash equivalent, will also no longer work on Safari. An upcoming version of Chrome will require users to take action to enable Flash if they want it. Content that requires Flash will fail to load - except for the top 10 sites in the world which are getting an extension. Firefox will also behave similarly. Updates with these new restrictions will start rolling out very soon and continue over the next few months. Flash-based video playback will no longer work - including ad playback.
So, if you use the Brightcove Player, what should you do? How should you prepare?
The Brightcove Player doesn’t use plugins on these browsers anyway - except sometimes for ads. But even in that case, the Brightcove Player switches over to pure HTML5 for ads when Flash is not present. So if you’re using the Brightcove Player version 5 as part of Video Cloud or Perform, you’re in very good shape. The Brightcove Player uses native HTML5 video on each of these browsers, using the new Media Source Extensions API to play HLS and DASH using lightweight JavaScript code where those formats aren’t natively supported. We’ve already made the migration to a pure HTML5 video experience as our default playback technology earlier this year. Even for DRM, you’re good - we use the native content decryption modules (CDMs) for encrypted DASH on Chrome, Edge, and Firefox - and very soon we’ll have support for FairPlay-encrypted HLS on Safari too.
But what about older browsers, you say? The Brightcove Player will use Flash on older browsers when there’s no other way to play HLS, and use Silverlight for DRM content - all automatically without any special configuration. There’s no sacrifice in features or a need to leave viewers using older browsers behind in order to take advantage of our latest and greatest player. It works just the way viewers expect, with the same HTML5 customization model, and with the same HLS, DASH, and MP4 renditions even on browsers like IE 10. That’s why we’ve seen over 70% of our web player traffic move to the new Brightcove Player. Concerned about upgrading from the Brightcove Smart Player? We have that covered too, and we even provide a way to replace our older player with our new HTML5 Brightcove Player without changing page code (a feature we call Directed Migration - see docs here).
Flash is going away, but with the Brightcove Player, you’re already prepared. And if you haven’t switched to the new Brightcove Player yet, you can try out the world’s highest-performance, most customizable, most standards-compliant video player for free - it’s already included with Video Cloud or as part of a free trial. Let us know what you think!
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