They use HTTP Live Streaming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming) which is Apple's own protocol and hasn't been adopted by anyone but Microsoft.

To be fair, when they first implemented it MPEG DASH was a long way off.

HLS is used in plenty of places outside Apple and Microsoft. For example, Twitch.tv uses it in their HTML5 player which works in all modern browsers.

If you paste the playlist URL from another subthread into an open-source HTML5 player [1], it works perfectly. There's literally no reason that Apple couldn't embed this on their home page except stubbornness.

[1]: http://dailymotion.github.io/hls.js/demo/

For those looking for the link to copy:

http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1603kjbnadc...

I believe it's also in fairly heavy use by Roku, as a supported technology that third party channels can use to provide a better streaming experience.

They use some sort of proprietary streaming .hls that for some reason doesn't support third-party browsers (DRM?) and Microsoft supports it but only wants it to be available in their Edge browser.

It's not that proprietary. FFMpeg supports creating these streams – I once created an encoding pipeline using HLS for a gig. The idea behind the tech is pretty good.

But yeah, browser support is very poor – I had to use a Flash fallback for browsers that didn't support it (which was basically everything but Safari at the time... looks like that sadly still hasn't changed).

At the time it was the best thing for the job, but I haven't done anything with video lately. What would be the best tool for the job these days? Regarding browsers support, etc.

You can still use it via Javascript that repackages the MPEG-TS into MP4 files. However, DASH or a similar home-rolled solution could potentially avoid the repackaging.

Yeah, HLS is really just an extension to the .m3u streaming MP3 playlist format. It's not hard to reason about or understand.

Interesting that Edge is allowed to stream.

PS: Wiki [1] says Apples's HTTP live streaming is supported on Chrome 30 and onwards.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

Isn't it more to do with safari doesn't run on Windows? So Apple need to officially support a Windows browser as to not exclude all those windows users

I checked that too. It's supported on Chrome 30 and onwards, but not for Chrome on desktop OSes.

Alternative theories:

1) They have a limited streaming capacity.

2) They gave up on expanding their user base.