So why does this work? Is Chrome 37 for Linux now being shipped with support for Encrypted Media Extensions, i.e., HTML's built-in DRM, with Netflix relying on EME? Or has something happened with Moonlight to support Netflix DRM? Or what?
The reason it works now is that Ubuntu 14.04 (the latest LTS version) has updated to the necessary version of NSS, so Netflix will serve HTML5 video to the standard Chrome user agent on Ubuntu. Netflix just didn't allow it before because the LTS version didn't support it - you had to manually update the NSS library outside of the package manager to make it work. Netflix just didn't want to flip the switch to allow it until it would work on the standard packages on the LTS version.
Source from a Netflix post on the Ubuntu mailing list - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2014-...
It seems to work on any Linux distro with the necessary Chrome and NSS versions now without any user agent altering - I'm able to watch Netflix on Arch Linux now with the standard user agent.
It only works in Chrome at the moment, as Firefox does not support the required DRM.
And, presumably, that they didn't announce it a month ago.
I had no idea.