Netflix Has Thrown in the Towel for Microsoft Silverlight

Netflix has been using Silverlight’s “high-quality streaming experience” for its “Watch Instantly” service. However Microsoft itself has lost interest in Silverlight and is looking for other shiny objects to play with. It announced that it was pulling the plug on Silverlight in 2021 and gave companies that use the video technology a decade to gravitate to an alternative. Netflix has now announced that in light of Microsoft’s announcement, it will be switching to HTML5 video. This means that Netflix will no longer have a lot of the problems of video plugins and browsers that don’t support them. Nor will it have to worry about the security risks of using plug-ins. HTML5 means that Netflix can set up a service to watch instant video on a wider range of devices and browsers. Read the full story here.