Romain Rouillard / Photo credit: NIKOS PEKIARIDIS / NURPHOTO / NURPHOTO VIA AFP
If your connected TV is starting to get old, you may no longer be able to access Netflix. The streaming service, which has 260 million subscribers around the world, is currently updating its application which could make it inoperable on certain terminals.
Contacted, Netflix assures that its service is today compatible with “more than 1,700 terminals” and defends the merits of this measure by citing “security reasons”. Concretely, for Netflix it is a question of banning a protocol, that is to say a set of rules which govern the exchange of data between a network and a connected device. In this case the SSLV3 protocol, which has become obsolete.
The rules of the Cyber Resiliency Act
“It was deprecated almost ten years ago, in June 2015,” tells us Loïc Guézo, cybersecurity expert. “Netflix is therefore bringing it into compliance with usual good practices,” he adds. According to him, the security argument, put forward by Netflix, is therefore well-founded. “This protocol was intended to encrypt the data exchanged between Netflix and television. It was deprecated because there were affordable technical means of circumventing the encryption functions and therefore of accessing, for example, the user account” .
If the maneuver may have seemed abrupt in the eyes of some subscribers, Netflix didn’t really have a choice. The platform had, in fact, to comply with the rules of the Cyber Resiliency Act, a European provision which requires players, such as Netflix, to no longer make available IT products containing security vulnerabilities. The reputation of the platform is also at stake, because if users were to suffer hacking due to this obsolete protocol, the responsibility would fall to Netflix.
Finally, it is quite easy to know whether or not your television will undergo this new update. “If you have not received notifications on your screen when connecting to the Netflix interface in recent days, it is because you are not affected,” assures Netflix. Otherwise, several solutions are available to you to access your content on Netflix: Google Chromecast, Apple TV or even the PlayStation 4 and 5 game consoles and the Xbox Series.