During the OS X Yosemite portion of its WWDC keynote yesterday, Apple announced a handful of improvements for Safari. Among them was HTML5 video support for Netflix, which according to Apple, will add an extra two hours of video watching on a single battery charge.
Netflix confirmed the news today, saying that its engineers have been “working closely with Apple” to allow Safari to use the Premium Video Extensions. This enables browsers play streaming videos without the need for overweight plug-in programs like Microsoft’s Silverlight…
From the official Netflix blog:
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’sMac 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!
The feature is already available in the developer preview of OS X 10.10 Yosemite, which was released yesterday. Yosemite will launch publicly this fall.