If you happen to have OS X 10.10 Yosemite installed on your Mac, you can try out Netflix’s HTML5-based video by simply logging into your Netflix account. Netflix previously required a plugin such as Microsoft’s Silverlight when viewing a video.
“Congratulations to the Apple team for advancing premium video on the web with Yosemite! We’re looking forward to the Yosemite launch this Fall,” Netflix engineering executives Anthony Park and Mark Watson wrote on the Netflix blog, announcing the move.
Media Source Extensions allow web developers to create playback streams in the browser using JavaScript, which enables the addition of features like adaptive streaming — adjusting the delivery of a video stream based on the way the recipient’s network is functioning — in the browser without plugins. According to Apple, moving this functionality from a plugin to the operating system could allow a MacBook Air to get an additional two hours of battery life when watching streaming video.
While Silverlight was required for a number of reasons, including digital right management, encrypted Media Extensions and WebCrypto address concerns about digital rights management, allowing end-to-end encryption of the media stream, thereby preventing users from capturing the stream and saving it to their hard drive as it streams in.
