Netflix presses ahead with HTML5, as free software activists call for boycott
Netflix is pushing ahead with efforts to get rid of Microsoft's Silverlight plugin and play video straight in the browser instead. The company first introduced HTML5-based video streaming on Google's Chromebooks …
Context & Ripple Effects
Netflix has been telegraphing this move since December 2010, when its engineers laid out why it chose HTML5 for device experiences and said it was working toward an HTML5 standard to bring streaming to every screen without plugins. What changed since then is execution: the company put HTML5 playback into production first on Google's Chromebooks, giving it a real-world testbed rather than a whitepaper.
The July 2013 push to retire Microsoft's Silverlight plugin lands mid-way through the industry argument Ars Technica framed back in November 2011 about HTML video in the post-Flash era — and this time it splits the audience, with free software activists calling for a boycott of Netflix over the transition while the trade press picks the story up widely across ITworld and Softpedia.
First-order effects
- Netflix's largest remaining plugin dependency starts shrinking: Silverlight, one of Microsoft's most visible consumer-facing deployments outside Windows itself, loses the flagship service that kept mainstream users installing it.
- Free software activists gain a concrete target and a rallying point, putting reputational pressure on Netflix at the exact moment its plugin-free strategy becomes visible to ordinary subscribers.
Second-order effects
- Other subscription video services face the same fork — stay on proprietary plugins or follow Netflix into browser-native playback — and whichever way Netflix proves out sets the template competitors copy.
- Browser vendors become the decisive layer: with playback logic moving from plugins into the browser itself, Google and Microsoft now control capabilities that third-party plugins used to provide, shifting negotiating leverage toward whoever ships the browser.
Third-order effects
- The episode accelerates the end of the plugin era for media: if the pattern holds, browser-native video with built-in content protection becomes the default delivery mechanism, and standalone media runtimes like Silverlight fade into maintenance mode.
- Standards bodies inherit the fight — the boycott shows that when premium video requirements get written into open web standards, the resulting specifications carry political weight well beyond their technical scope.
The trend: Premium streaming is migrating from proprietary plugins to browser-native HTML5 delivery, and each major migration forces the web's open-standards ideals to negotiate with Hollywood's content-protection demands.