Netflix ditches Silverlight for HTML5 on Macs too: Available today in Safari on OS X Yosemite beta
Netflix today furthered its plans to ditch Silverlight for HTML5 on Macs, having already done so last year in IE11 on Windows 8.1. HTML5 video is now supported by Netflix in Safari on OS X Yosemite …
Context & Ripple Effects
Netflix has been walking away from Silverlight for years: it announced work on an HTML5 streaming standard back in 2010, and in July 2013 it pressed ahead despite free-software activists calling for a boycott over the DRM involved. The first real deployment came in IE11 on Windows 8.1 last year.
What changed today is platform breadth: HTML5 playback now runs in Safari on the OS X Yosemite beta, meaning the plug-in-free path is no longer a single-browser experiment but a cross-platform rollout. The pickup across eight outlets from The Netflix Tech Blog to MacRumors shows how much attention the Mac side carries.
First-order effects
- Mac users on the Yosemite beta can stream Netflix without installing or updating Silverlight, removing the last major consumer reason to keep Microsoft's plugin alive in Safari.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's Silverlight loses its highest-profile remaining consumer workload on a second OS, while rival browser vendors face pressure to match Safari's and IE11's support for the protected-media extensions Netflix's player requires.
Third-order effects
- If the Windows-to-Mac pattern holds, premium web video consolidates around browser-native HTML5 playback with built-in content protection, finishing what Netflix signaled when it committed to an open streaming standard in 2010 — at the cost of the free-software objections raised in 2013.
The trend: Streaming video is migrating from proprietary browser plugins like Silverlight to HTML5 players with native content protection, led by whichever browser each platform's users already have installed.