14 DAY TRIAL // Netflix is looking to expand its business, and one of the ways to do that is to look at what other platforms it can support. Ubuntu is the most used Linux distribution, so it stands to reason that they might be interested to have their service working on it.
If you live in one of the unfortunate countries that don’t have Netflix just yet, then you must know that this is an online service that provides TV shows and movies on demand. This is just one side of their business, because the company started its life by renting DVDs and it's now the biggest online provider of entertainment.
Those of you who are living in the Netflix coverage area but are using an Ubuntu system might have noticed that you can't watch said online source. The problem is caused by a library (isn't it always?) that needs to be upgraded in order to allow the Netflix guys to make it work.
Netflix is blocked due to security reasons
The Netflix service checks the user agent of the browser before allowing the online streaming to work. This means that users with a lower version of the NSS library (Network Security Services) won't be able to use HTML5 to play the content. As usual, this being Linux, some users have been able to make some changes so that Netflix works, but it's not an elegant solution.
A couple of days ago, the Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, Paul Adolph, made an inquiry in the official Ubuntu mailing list about upgrading the NSS library to a newer version, which would allow the streaming company to have their service run natively.
"Netflix will play with Chrome stable in 14.02 if NSS version 3.16.2 or greater is installed. If this version is generally installed across 14.02, Netflix would be able to make a change so users would no longer have to hack their User-Agent to play," says Paul Adolph.
When it will be fixed
The answer for this rather simple request arrived soon from an Ubuntu developer, Marc Deslauriers, but he also explains that it's not as simple as just upgrading the library.
"I was planning on bumping nss to 3.17 in the stable releases as a security update the next time a security issue needs to be fixed, or to update the bundled CA certificate list. I'm not sure when that is going to be, but I might take a look at it next week since it hasn't been updated in a while and a bunch of 1024-bit CA certs got removed recently."
By the looks of it, the Netflix service might be playable in Ubuntu 14.04 sooner than you think, although there isn't any kind of time frame attached to it.