Requiring protocol level DRM to be included in video/music streaming technologies has always baffled me.

What's the point? Even with theoretically perfect protocol level DRM, the consumer eventually has to be able to see/hear the protected content. If the frames of the video are displayed on screen, and the audio played through the speakers, the output can be recorded and preserved, period.

Do the people in charge of making these decisions not realize that whatever convoluted DRM technologies they pay to be developed and implemented will always be defeated by a $30 camcorder from the 90s?

After working in the broadcasting industry for a few years... the answer is that the management of companies in the chain simply doesn't care. DRM absolves them of any kind of piracy blame and they happily pile blame around on people who push back on DRM. That's about it to the story - actual results never come into the reasoning.

I had always considered this the most likely explanation.

The tendency for humans to implement elaborate but ineffective security theaters in an attempt to convince people they're protected from fundamentally unprotectable threats is as old as society itself.

As a consequence, chrome can't watch netflix videos at full quality, anybody who flys in the US has to remove their shoes, and my child has to wear a clear backpack to school. I wish we'd stop playing these silly games of pretend which degrade the quality of life of everyone.

> Requiring protocol level DRM to be included in video/music streaming technologies has always baffled me.

> What's the point?

It's the same reason you put a lock on the door to your house. You know the lock is easily bypassed by tools. The windows are easily broken. The door can probably be easily forced open. But you still lock the door when you leave in the morning.

Locks are about keeping casual theives as honest people. DRM is about keeping casual pirates as honest customers. It's about making it just difficult enough to copy that most people will consider it not worth the bother. It's about saying, "You must be this determined to break the law."

> making it just difficult enough to copy that most people will consider it not worth the bother

I don't think that the analogy holds up. The deterrence only applies to uploaders and not consumers, because the processes for removing DRM and distributing videos are independent. It just takes one person to make a video available to the entire world. It does seem like torrents are available for most of the Netflix catalogue, so I'm skeptical that DRM is useful for popular shows.

The analogy is good, but the reasoning is a bit off. Let me fix it - You still lock your door in the morning because you know that your insurance company will not pay out your theft insurance if anything gets stolen. DRM is mandated all the way up the chain (and noone really cares if it works).

They realize, of course. It's not the true reason for DRM, which is squashing competition[1]

[1] https://boingboing.net/2017/09/18/antifeatures-for-all.html

Here's the real rub: the videos have already been pirated at full quality, and are available online for free. They're doing a poor job of defending something that has already been breached.

That all said, camcorders don't get you anywhere: the goal isn't ripping the video, it's ripping the high quality video. DRM can theoretically defend against that, but you'd need to control the whole stack, incl. hardware, incl. the monitor and speakers.

>but you'd need to control the whole stack, incl. hardware, incl. the monitor

Even then, you could tear monitor apart and grab LVDS signals to panel.

DRM works on multiple fronts, causal piracy is one. The other is the control over player production, what features it will have, who can and who cannot make it, etc. Those who can make good deals, will get an advantage.

Someone above linked a help page that says, that for 4K Netflix you need Edge and Intel Kaby Lake or newer. Do you think that it was free for Microsoft or Intel, or some good deal sweetened that?

> causal piracy

Not sure if you mean causal or casual. Casual is going to piratebay and downloading.

I would agree that DRM and other anti-consumer things (unskippable things on dvds, adverts accusing you of pirating the dvd you've actually bought, etc) does cause piracy though

Recording the analog output has a lower quality than the original stream for 3 main reasons:

1. Marketing and psychology: Viewers want to believe they are viewing the original, not a degraded copy.

2. Unfaithful copy: Analog output and analog input introduce errors. LCDs use a variety of tricks to improve resolution such as spacial and temporal dithering. Also you can't use a normal camera to record a monitor because of aliasing (of pixels and non-genlocked frame rates).

3. Encoding noise. The encoding of the original is based on the higher quality original, and carefully optimised for the least visual artifacts. Any re-encoding also has to deal with noise introduced by the copying process, and with the noise introduced by the original encoding. This noise noticeably reduces the quality of a copy.

If anyone is wondering, this whole concept referred to as the analog hole. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

There are many answers to your question but for starters:

- There is no perfect security. There is a notion of raising the expense of piracy to a level that it effectively does not matter.

- IIRC, for instance, rooted Android loses support for... Widevine? So you can't really use Netflix on a rooted device where you could easily steal frames from the video buffer. Yeah, you can rig up a nice camera system and record analog off the display. Nothing they can do about that. They also may insert watermarks to let them know who recorded it.

I bought an HDMI cloner box the same day Netflix announced they were adding this DRM.

I actually haven't even taken it out of the box yet. But it just feels good to know their DRM is pointless.

They don't care because once the signal hits analog the quality will be much lower.

But why should I, as a viewer, care about that?

Because content providers are making you care about that. They _demand_ that you're prevented from seeing high quality TV if your platform doesn't fully lock you out.

Do netflix limit their own shows?

Yes, they apply full DRM to their own content as well.

The answer is probably "because your content is locked on that provider", but that's a less and less valuable point.

Obviously, BitTorrent was the big reason in the past, but now the reality is that there is a lot of competition in the video space - you aren't just competing with films and tv shows, but youtube videos, twitch streams, etc...

It most likely does for paid offerings. I doubt you'll be able to watch a paid 4K movie on youtube/google movies unless you satisfy their highest widevine requirements. I think youtube's 1080p requirements may be more relaxed than netflix though. Regular yt has no DRM of course.