Google Chrome OS is basically a light weight operating system designed around a web browser. The idea is that you’ll be able to do anything with a Chrome OS laptop that you can do with a web browser and a Windows or Mac laptop. But right now there’s at least one major web app that doesn’t run on Chrome OS: Netflix.

That’s because Netflix requires the Microsoft Silverlight plugin, which only runs on Windows and Mac at the moment. There’s an open source implementation of Silverlight called Moonlight, but last time I checked Moonlight doesn’t support Netflix — and Chrome OS doesn’t support Moonlight, so the point is kind of moot.

But the folks at The Chrome Story found some Chrome OS code reviews suggesting that an official Netflix plugin for Chrome OS is in the works.

Neither Google nor Netflix has made any official announcements, but it looks like a plugin is being tested on some pre-release devices, but not the Google Cr-48 laptop, which may be an indication that this is supposed to be a secret. After all, there are already thousands of Cr-48 laptops in the wild, so it’d be hard to keep a lid on the plugin if it were pushed to that device.

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3 replies on “Google may be building support for Netflix into Chrome OS”

  1. You’re all nimrods, The CR-48 has a pretty close relation too the Set-Top boxes and any ARM based system, Via the Verified Boot part of the boot loader, well granted ANY DRM scheme can be cracked, the CR-48/ChromeOS VB is a pretty tough nugget.

  2. You guys are forgetting something. Silverlight is how Netflix is delivered on Windows because apparently Hollywierd trusts the DRM to prevent trivial extraction of the stream. Settop boxes do not have the grunt to use a managed code environment and thus run a native client. They get their blessing from Hollywoord through a total DRM lockdown of the boot and execution environment.

    The CR-48 is a pretty stock Intel platform, ARM based netbooks will have the same DRM lockdown available as a settop box.

  3. Hopefully that would mean Android would have a Netflix port as well, since Google is behind both? It seems kind of odd to have Netflix on Chrome OS since that’s an OS that doesn’t even ship on a product at this point, meanwhile Android is on tablets and phones all over creation.

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