Netflix officially announce to support HTML5 video in Safari on OS X Yosemite and moving away from Silverlight. It’s a good news for people who don’t want to install Microsoft Silverlight on their system just to stream video from Netflix. Why nobody like Silverlight from Microsoft? Its simply Silverlight plugin does not work well in Mac (sometimes No Audio/Video, distorted video, video out of sync, choppy video… and such) and it’s not work in Linux and Unix. Silverlight plugin is very similar to Adobe flash plugin which allow you to run rich Internet applications. Also Silverlight uses copy protection technology or DRM (Digital Rights Management), means you can only watch copyrighted content.
It’s a good news that Netflix is moving a way from Silverlight and start to use HTML5 to stream their videos. Netflix has been working closely with Apple to make it’s videos to work with Safari web browser. Netflix introduces their new Premium Source Extensions to prevent people copy it’s video, in another word it’s a content protection. Similar to it’s counterpart, Premium Video Extensions will optimize video on OS X using hardware acceleration using GPU (graphic card). You can watch 1080p video with very minimal CPU, which will greatly increase battery life if you use laptop or tablet.
You can already watch streaming video from netflix with HTML5 on Internet Explore 11 and Google Chrome. Switching to HTML5, unlike Adobe Flash which you can easily download/rip streaming video, Safari web browser supports “premium video content” which is DRM (Digital Rights Management). Means you can’t download/rip Netflix videos.
Sadly there is no news from Netflix supporting Linux yet, If you want to use Netflix on Linux, you still have to use wine/pipelight to watch Netflix on a Linux/GNU system.