I'm all for a 'de facto' standardisation around a royalty free codec, which is what we get with AV1, but lets not pretend that these companies are doing this for any altruistic reasons.

Everything is moving to streaming, and video usage will only keep growing, so for these huge companies, having what is increasingly a core part of their business in the financial hands of third parties is an extremely unattractive position.

Google was already dead set on leaving this dependency, and now when they started work on their third generation codec (VP10) many other companies started to get the message, prompted in a large part no doubt by the HEVC patent fiasco, which now has resulted in AV1.

>AV1 has a really slow encoder, so until that has changed

Well, optimization has likely only recently started in earnest, given that the bitstream was frozen this summer. Personally I'm more interested in the RAV1e AV1 encoder in the works from Xiph than I am in the 'official' one.

Yep.

If anyone wants to know what Google and Mozilla would do in the face of corporations closing off the Internet, you can look at what they _actually did_ with Encrypted Media Extensions.

The whole "DRM will happen one way or another, EME is better" is only an acceptable argument if you don't have an issue with DRM (because then you can argue that EME is "nicer" than non-EME because EME is a "standard form" of DRM).

Making it frustrating for people to access DRM content results in a distrust of DRM vendors and a general dislike of DRM -- which is (in my view) a positive outcome. Facilitating DRM in a way that makes it much easier for people to view it is not a neutral position in a world where "DRM is inevitable".

EME is bad if you believe DRM would die/be less common if no standard existed.

Tough luck with that though since EME only specifies how to communicate with DRM, and the actual DRM consists of multiple 100% proprietary black boxes that only work on blessed end devices and browsers. And since different browsers have different black boxes, you need to play ball with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and every other unique DRM vendor.

EME is a disgrace that should have never come to pass. Premium media should rather be forced to peddle their own clients entirely separate from browsers if they insist on non-cross-platform black box bullshit.

I'm not against content protection in itself, but EME was 100% marketed on false pretenses because it's just as much of a proprietary plugin system than what came before, with just as terrible cross-platform story too. If instead we had content protection schemes implemented in eg. WebAssembly, then we could actually talk about a cross-platform system that also doesn't immediately close out smaller browser vendors from the market.

Waterboarding is the better option if you believe that torture is going to happen one way or the other.

The Hollywood studios also have the power not to enforce having to use DRM on their licensees.

Firefox was forced by Chrome, and Chrome in turn was probably forced by trying to remain a viable platform instead of Netflix et al. simply providing their own desktop apps. (Though I'm only guessing, if you have direct knowledge of the what and why, please do share.)

The kind of users who are not opposed against DRM already have lots of browsers to choose between. On the other hand, people who are will now feel deeply betrayed by the Mozilla Foundation.

If you're opposed to a browser that can be used by DRM modules, Firefox was already not an option, since it supported NPAPI, and therefore DRM as Flash, Silverlight, etc. If you were using Firefox, you were already accepting that compromise. EME is simply a continuation of the status quo.

Was there an explicit or implicit covenant by Mozilla and those users?

I believe Mozilla's clear stance on DRM in the past (and its clear differentiation against other browser vendors in this respect) is near to such an implicit covenant.

> Compared with the US, China still has plenty of room to grow in a country with a population of about 1.4 billion and 751 million internet users. The proportion of internet users who pay for video content has increased more than 10 times in four years, rising to 13.2 per cent in 2016, and is expected to further increase to 40 per cent in 2022, iResearch said. By comparison, Netflix’s US-based paying members represented around 28.1 per cent of total internet video users in the country as of the end of 2016.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2137870/chinas-consumers-a...

It doesn't matter, when people or any English media speaks of the world, what they really meant was mostly English speaking World. Ignoring China most of the time.

Not the first time I have seen something like World First, World biggest etc when it is not true.

How are they not the biggest service?

Talking about paying users only, maybe Netflix is still on the top - not for long, of course.

> According to research firm IHS Markit, video streaming in China will more than quadruple from $3.5 billion in 2015, to $17.6 billion in 2020. Membership payment will take up a bigger share of the pie, increasing over 500% to $2.6 billion, with the rest coming from advertising revenue.

But talking about active users, iQiyi now have more than 500 million active users.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ywang/2018/03/07/the-billion-do...

Yes, but it's all Chinese services combined, not just their top 1st. Unless every of those Chinese subscribers pay for the same service, Netflix is still probably the 1st worldwide paying video service.

But talking about active users, iQiyi now have more than 500 million active users.

Which is small compared to YouTube's 1.8 billion.

But fair enough, maybe YouTube and iQiyi are the biggest players; foepys was still at least half-right.

It does seem that iQiyi is using HEVC for high-res content as well, so the point still stands :)

4k on netflix is still only a small amount, as the people that have either a 4k TV, the bandwidth and device to play it on are still quite rare.

I've never heard of Youtube serving anything but h264 or VP8/VP9.