Re:Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have tw...
by kelnos on Saturday July 08, 2017 @01:31AM
(#14724224)
Sure, and you can point a camera at the display device, but you'll suffer lower quality.
And you can also buy some expensive hardware to sit between the HDCP decoder chip and the output to the display panel, and buy some more expensive hardware to deal with the huge volume of raw, uncompressed video that comes out of it.
But the content producers are betting that most people won't consider the first option good enough, and will find the second option prohibitively expensive. They're also betting that most people will opt for the convenience of getting it through the browser or mobile device (for a fee) and won't want to deal with getting it from not-so-legit sources. They're comfortable with these tradeoffs, for now, so they're doing what they're doing.
They absolutely don't care about the small minority of people who will do anything to get hold of the content unencumbered. They know they can't control that group of people, but they aren't losing sleep over it. Because, for now, that minority is too small to hurt their bottom line. If that changes, I'm sure they'll pursue a new strategy. But for now, they don't need to.
And you can also buy some expensive hardware to sit between the HDCP decoder chip and the output to the display panel, and buy some more expensive hardware to deal with the huge volume of raw, uncompressed video that comes out of it.
But the content producers are betting that most people won't consider the first option good enough, and will find the second option prohibitively expensive. They're also betting that most people will opt for the convenience of getting it through the browser or mobile device (for a fee) and won't want to deal with getting it from not-so-legit sources. They're comfortable with these tradeoffs, for now, so they're doing what they're doing.
They absolutely don't care about the small minority of people who will do anything to get hold of the content unencumbered. They know they can't control that group of people, but they aren't losing sleep over it. Because, for now, that minority is too small to hurt their bottom line. If that changes, I'm sure they'll pursue a new strategy. But for now, they don't need to.