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Out of curiosity, is there a good reason for Netflix to do this? I.e., why would they be interested in providing 1080p to Safari but not Chrome, even if Chrome
by wdr1 9y ago
Out of curiosity, is there a good reason for Netflix to do this? I.e., why would they be interested in providing 1080p to Safari but not Chrome, even if Chrome can do 1080p?
- bzbarsky 9y agoThe most likely reason is that they have contractual agreements about how easy it is to be able to get at the data by unauthorized parties (read "the person watching the video") for various resolutions. For example, their contracts could say that for 1080p the playback mechanism has to guarantee security all the way to screen (e.g no playback over digital video cables that don't support the requisite encryption primitives). Generally this requires support from the OS and hardware, and the relevant playback application using the relevant OS functionality. This is why you get 1080p in IE and Safari, but Safari only on OS X 10.0.3 or later. You get 4K in Edge. You get 1080p on ChromeOS (where things are locked down in ways that prevent the viewer from exfiltrating data), but not in Chrome. Similarly, last I checked, you could get higher resolution videos from the iTunes store on iOS or Apple TV than you could on desktop MacOS, because the latter is not as locked-down. That was a few years ago, though.