by Anthony Park and Mark Watson.

We’re excited to announce that Netflix streaming in HTML5 video is now available in Safari on OS X Yosemite! We’ve been working closely with Apple to implement the Premium Video Extensions in Safari, which allow playback of premium video content in the browser without the use of plugins. If you’re in Apple’s Mac Developer Program, or soon the OS X Beta Program, you can install the beta version of OS X Yosemite. With the OS X Yosemite Beta on a modern Mac, you can visit Netflix.com today in Safari and watch your favorite movies and TV shows using HTML5 video without the need to install any plugins.

We’re especially excited that Apple implemented the Media Source Extensions (MSE) using their highly optimized video pipeline on OS X. This lets you watch Netflix in buttery smooth 1080p without hogging your CPU or draining your battery. In fact, this allows you to get up to 2 hours longer battery life on a MacBook Air streaming Netflix in 1080p — that’s enough time for one more movie!

Apple also implemented the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) which provides the content protection needed for premium video services like Netflix.

Finally, Apple implemented the Web Cryptography API (WebCrypto) in Safari, which allows us to encrypt and decrypt communication between our JavaScript application and the Netflix servers.

The Premium Video Extensions do away with the need for proprietary plugin technologies for streaming video. In addition to Safari on OS X Yosemite, plugin-free playback is also available in IE 11 on Windows 8.1, and we look forward to a time when these APIs are available on all browsers.

Congratulations to the Apple team for advancing premium video on the web with Yosemite! We’re looking forward to the Yosemite launch this Fall.

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