How to Watch Netflix on Ubuntu with Moonlight

Running Netflix is entirely possible in Ubuntu Linux 12.04 (and most likely any other modern distribution). See the section below "Running with Wine".

Until recently there was no simple solution to watching streaming movies viaNetflix (Watch Instantly) in Linux for any Linux distros besides Android based computers. Netflix has not released a player that will install natively in any of the others.

This is because they use Microsoft Silverlight plugin with DRM. Although there is a Linux alternative to Silverlight called Moonlight, it does not have any DRM built in and it is unlikely Moonlight will implement a DRM option. Netflix has stated they will not use anything without DRM. So if Netflix continues to use Silverlight, then there will be no official Linux support. 

This is how to work around this problem in a very non-ideal way. It relies on running Windows in Linux. If you have a Mid to High end system this howto will probably play Netflix fine. If your system is Low end or an older system, this how to will still work, but video may be choppy. Audio will probably be fine.