A standards body is a great place to achieve consensus around a negotiating position, but a pretty big chunk of this standards body doesn't want the negotiating position you want.
If any one vendor - it doesn't matter whether it's a browser, or an operating system, or a graphics card, or a monitor, etc. - agrees to add DRM technology, they hope they'll get an increase in usage / sales at the margin by convincing shy media producers to distribute.
The only way to stop it is to band together and refuse across the board. Individually, everybody gets picked off. You can't be the only monitor that can't play movies, or the only browser that can't show the latest episode of GoT.
One might argue that these people would never pay for content and so mustn't be considered when talking about paid content. But given a chance not to jump through hoops and with geography specific pricing, there are ways to get people to pay. That could add up when done right on a large population base. Right now the big content houses are literally leaving money on the table and encouraging piracy (to put it in a different way)!
For me, a DRM-free experience is one I can enjoy on all platforms and devices I have. It also has a much better general UX.
Measured in all ways I can measure quality, DRM only reduces it. Thus sites like TPB still has the upper hand for people who care about quality, portability and UX.
WRT movies:
WEBDL is usually 4-5GB
720p Bluray: 6GB
1080p: 8GB and up.
I'm not sure how true that is. Currently getting content is easy enough that the average consumer doesn't use it, but at least back in the mid 00's the technical people in my social circle got introduced to torrents by people who didn't know how turn off a computer except by unplugging it. They we're willing to take all sorts of risks with their computer on sketchy sites the second it became the easiest way to get their content.
If torrents and piracy become the easiest way again, I could easily see regular people going right back to it.
I still really don't think the protests happened because people suddenly became aware of abstract consequences of an obscure deal proposal. But exactly at that time, in an unrelated case, FBI shut down Megavideo, widely used by regular people then. This is what they took as a future of Internet under SOPA, and that's why, I believe (based on first-hand experience), they went to the streets.
I strongly believe that the convenience of Netflix and iTunes only exists because of piracy, and the industry would never have chosen it otherwise. They'd be stuck on pay per view.
Piracy does have serious negative side effects on both content creators and end users. It's kind of a hacker fantasy that it doesn't.
Ordinary consumers get it via sneaker-net on a USB key that they can now plug directly into their TV. Before that there was pirated DVD's and video cassettes, but the ease and cost of piracy is still improving faster than legitimate methods.
HD .mkv files can be viewed on virtually any device, including "smart" TVs long forgotten by their manufacturers which do not support Netflix/Roku/whatever apps, open source devices, smartphones, or regular computers. Usually, you just need to plug in a USB drive and press play.
They can also be of arbitrary high quality. And usually higher, not lower than streaming sources which adjust to network conditions.
It's true that the plans at legitimate distributors are currently very inexpensive. A good seedbox will run higher than Spotify and Netflix subscriptions plus a bowl of nachos but neither the quality, nor the choice, or convenience are even close to piracy.
You can download entire BluRay disks, about 40GB, 4K shows, 10GB IIRC.
You are wrong. Pirates have the same or HIGHER quality video in most cases.
In the US, maybe. In some other, less capitalist countries… well, paying for non-physical things seemed ridiculous. Still kinda does, but app stores have somewhat changed that.
Doesn't seem obvious to me. Why wouldn't they use their existing native apps?
In fact it seems they have apps for all platforms out there, except the traditional desktop, something it would cost them almost nothing to provide on top of their existing app-offerings.
Basically Netflix is the best proof you have that you don't need DRM in HTML.
And yet here we are. It's absolutely infuriating.
DRM is the price that content providers ask of Netflix. Netflix is fine with that, because the alternative is less content. Browser makers are ok with that, because the alternative is fewer people on browsers and more people on native apps. I'm personally ok with that because I dislike installing apps and I prefer the browser, although most people don't have a preference.
1. It avoids the ethical problem of pushing DRM onto people who just want a browser. (Firefox does offer a EME-free version, but you have to look for it, when you might not even know what EME is). If a CDM module installed automatically by Firefox becomes an exploit vector, they are ethically responsible, in my opinion.
2. It preserves browser competition. CDM modules only work in approved browsers, so people building new browsers are at a disadvantage. They may be able to use Firefox's sandboxed component, but it's not clear yet.
3. It avoids having second-class OSs for those browsers. For example, Firefox runs on MIPS and SPARC, but the CDM modules don't.
4. It makes it more expensive to use DRM.
This misses my point. No one cares about DRM - not the streaming service, or the browser vendors or most importantly, the users. Consumers have voted with their wallets on this - they'd rather watch Netflix than torrent.
Maybe I'm being callous, but I don't care much about "the ethical problem of pushing DRM". Nor do I care much about MIPS and SPARC. How many end users are running MIPS and SPARC anyway? And I especially don't care about it being difficult to use DRM. All of this sounds like ideological purity, which in my opinion, is a waste of time.
Could you list some benefits that would be appreciated by more than 0.1% of society?
It comes down to the same set of reasons.
Well, that, or they would have went the direction of newspapers & news - give up on producing quality content, and instead cater to the lowest common denominator by producing the cheapest, most polarising content possible.
This is a world where we were a couple years ago. The content providers used plugins to provide DRM for the raw video (Widevine for example) or serve the video inside a container that has DRM (flash/silverlight). One of the main reasons for flash and silverlight dying away is that browsers could do more and more of what they did. And playing video the way the content producers/distributors wanted is a big part of that.
In a world where browser manufacturers, as a block, refused to implement DRM, it's seems obvious that sooner or later visual media producers would be forced to the table, to gain access to paying consumers. We could be in a DRM-free world, without the inconveniences of elaborate technical restrictions on pass-through and mutual device compatibility, or black box binary blobs on otherwise open source operating systems.
With a look on TPB, it seems evident that DRM doesn't work to prevent piracy. Any technical means that would be used to download a rate-adaptive video stream and save locally in the absence of DRM would seem to me to be more involved for the end consumer than downloading pirated media directly - so I don't think DRM even works as a speed-bump.
A standards body is a great place to achieve consensus around a negotiating position. I don't think the consensus that was reached was the one that leads to the best final result. The distance between where we are now, and that final result, is the cost of this decision.