Netflix wants out-of-the-box support on Ubuntu

Netflix wants to ensure that users of Ubuntu can also access Netflix by default, using the HTML5 video player. At the moment this is already possible, but users have to perform a number of actions.

Currently, Ubuntu users can only use Netflix’s HTML5 video playback if they manually upgrade a package to a newer version and then spoof their user agent so that Netflix thinks it’s a supported platform. They must also be using a beta version of Chrome.

The newer version of the NSS library, which is used for encrypted communication, is required to play content from Netflix in HTML5 video playback. A Netflix employee therefore asks the Ubuntu mailing list whether the newer version of the NSS library can be automatically included with Ubuntu. If that happens, Netflix can make a change so that Ubuntu is seen as a supported platform and users no longer have to spoof their user agent.

For a long time, users of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions could only watch Netflix using Wine, which allows Windows software to run on Linux. That was because Netflix only supported Silverlight in the browser; although it is also a Linux implementation, it is not suitable for playing Netflix videos.