Netflix said Wednesday that it is midway through a transition to HTML5 for its laptop streaming technology at the expense of Microsoft's Silverlight.
The move, delivered, in Netflix's third quarter letter to investors highlighted a four-year effort to migrate from Silverlight. In the letter, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells said:
"We are midway through switching to native HTML5 streaming for our laptop players, eliminating downloads (of Silverlight) and improving the consumer proposition with a smoother playback experience and longer battery life. This has been a successful four-year effort to get strong DRM integrated into the major browsers."
On other tech issues, Netflix highlighted that it is able to support more set-top boxes and that it is updating its recommendation engine, which now includes visual searches on the Web and mobile.
Among other items:
Here's the breakdown: