14 DAY TRIAL // The introduction of the ARM-based Samsung Chromebook turned the Chromebook from a niche device into a somewhat popular niche device. The phone-sourced processor was cheap, small and frugal.
This meant that Samsung saved money on the processor itself – which it builds, the cooling system – which is minimal, and the battery – a smaller battery can last longer.
The downside was that apps built for the x86 architecture didn't work on the ARM version of Chrome OS. But since Chrome OS doesn't have any native apps, this wasn't a problem, almost.
A few apps in the web store are platform-dependent, those relying on Native Client for a performance boost.
One of them is the Netflix app which hasn't been working on the Samsung Chromebook, until now. Actually, it's still not working, but Netflix users can finally enjoy the shows they love on their Samsung Chromebooks and they don't even need to install any apps.
That's because, surprisingly enough, this didn't happen because of Netflix porting the app to the ARM platform, not necessarily. It happened because of HTML5 DRM.
Netflix uses DRM to serve video streams, based on the unfounded logic that, with DRM, things won't get pirated. Since there are pirate copies of everything, it's obvious that this isn't true. But DRM is here to stay and ruin other entertainment mediums while it's at it, as the SimCity fiasco has proven.
Normally, Netflix uses the Silverlight plugin, Microsoft deprecated alternative to Flash. But Silverlight isn't supported on Linux, on which Chrome OS is based.
To get around this, Netflix packaged the plugin as a Native Client Chrome app, but the app only worked on x86 platforms.
Chrome recently added support for encrypted HTML5 video streams, a technology supported by Google, Microsoft and Netflix and proposed as a W3C standard. This, in turn, enabled Netflix to use HTML5 video streaming rather than Silverlight technology. The bright side is that Netflix now works straight from the web. The downside is web DRM.