Having worked with various DRM teams I know that they have to treat their code as if its the most secret code in the world, if they don't the media companies can swoop in and ban them and then no Netflix for your users. This is why Widevine code isn't open source (other than the glue EME code) and is almost certainly the reason for the refusal to work with a small open-source form of Chromium. If for example the project was used to "steal" content the media companies would be mad at Widevine, with lasting repercussions for all Chrome users.
It's worth noting that typically all DRM teams work as if the hosting environment is an adversary. For example Widevine don't trust anything Chrome says as someone could recompile it and lie about the security. The only times this is relaxed is where the platform is deemed secure, such as CrOS or iOS.
Let's say Google, Microsoft and Apple announce that they will be removing any DRM from their browsers on 2020-01-01. They will also remove any DRM playback app from their App Stores. So no Netflix on PCs, Macs, iPhones, iPads or any Android device (including stuff like Android TV).
What do you think would happen?
A lot of smaller companies would die, and a lot of users would suffer - but none of the parties involved actually cares about the users; we're just a natural resource to be stripmined.
Even elderly people were using and watching pirated stuff installed by their kids as they just couldn’t bother.
No DRM support in major browsers would mean pirating becomes the #1 way to see anything again.
Then again, the way media companies are balkanizing the streaming space, this could become (again) a reality soon anyway.
Users follow use cases and would not be averse to spending 30 seconds installing something in order to watch their favorite content.
There's also sort of a game theory situation with the removal of DRM, as it would be a competitive advantage being the only one that supports it.
People paying for Netflix are paying for convenience. That wouldn’t change in absence of DRM.
But back to the point, if Netflix wouldn’t use DRM, it would change absolutely nothing since copyright infringement is still illegal and those DRM protections are completely useless.
If the latter, torrenting is plenty cumbersome enough that if the studios are pushing movie-viewing to "Pay us money or you have to torrent it," they're winning.
Yes, and this functionality has been built into many of the largest torrenting programs out-of-the-box for quite some time now. In the case of µTorrent, it was added in version 3.0 all the way back in 2010.
Obviously, how quickly the stream will buffer depends entirely on the state of the swarm. Popular items will work almost immediately, while particularly unpopular items won't be streamable at all.
Anecdotally, I have personally witnessed my (very nontechnical) friends streaming 4+ GB 1080p ...popular cat videos... that weren't available from Netflix. They did not struggle with the process in the slightest.
Last I checked, the BitTorrent protocol didn't provide packet sorting that would allow for this behavior (by forcing the beginning of the movie's bytestream to be the first data downloaded), so my mistake if the protocol has improved and I was unaware it provided this service.
How is that different from the current state of EME plugins? Other than that proprietary browsers ship with the most popular plugins installed.
DRM is not illegitimate. It just sucks and operates in a way that is immune to free market competition - the reasons for that immunity are the true thing to fix. Users should have alternatives as there is a clear market there. If DRM is so bad, then that's what should kill it.
Of course, content producers could run back to the state for more protection (as they always do) and get legislation forcing browser makers to comply. And around and around it goes.
Implementations of such forced-by-court features tend to be buggy. ;-) The implementation bugs might differ in subtle ways in each new browser release. ;-)
Then Apple and Google would get deluged with complaints from their customers and Jailbreaks would once again become popular.
Consumers will have to purchase or rent horrible and overpriced hardware supplied by broadcasters. Like they were doing for decades with satellites, and early IPTV.
Piracy will raise a lot. Many users don’t want to pay, or can’t pay for that custom hardware. I was using Netflix service for some time without major issues, but they don’t have anything in my country, too small one, they won’t be selling and supporting their set top boxes any time soon. Unlike accepting credit cards and broadcasting videos, physical retail doesn’t scale that easily.
If they would only remove it from the browsers, they would start pushing their native applications like Netflix for Linux, Netflix for Windows, Netflix for Mac. And browsers would be free of their DRM which causes all this.
I wonder if more protocols like this will get invented and become mainstream. Or those glorious days are already behind us? Since every big corporation is just trying to grab market share by creating walled gardens for everything.
And your house also belongs to them. According to your analogy.
The only thing it could even arguably be doing is preventing users from uploading videos to pirate sites, but that is empirically a massive failure given that all of the videos are already on the pirate sites.
So all you're doing is battling the honest people who have paid and then want to make a copy for format shifting or some other fair use. And the legitimate value of battling that is a negative number.
The former is about the same effort as torrenting and about as obviously dishonest. The latter is mostly possible using Netflix as intended as long as I don't mind sharing my password with them.
We were sold DRM as "the evil legacy studios are evil and make us use DRM". Well, now that Netflix produces their own content and it's still DRM'd... I guess that isn't really the reasoning.
In the rare case of content that is actually made by Netflix, it’s easier to just put DRM on it, because otherwise every system dedicated to encoding and playback would have to have a code branch that was special for non-DRM content. It would be a maintenance nightmare. It’s a lot easier to push all content through the same pipelines.
DRM benefits Netflix just as much, if not even more than it does traditional media companies.
DRM does not benefit Netflix. It’s complicated and takes a lot of resources to run. They’d much rather not have to deal with it at all. Having DRM does not gain them any customers — in fact it loses them some. But it’s the only way they can get content.
(The closest I can get to an explanation is that the "exclusivity" deal might be limited to online streaming platforms only, and whoever is selling the content still worries about everything else. But streaming is a significant and growing portion of all media consumption (and could be even more so, were it not for that pesky DRM), so I'm extremely skeptical that this would be a real issue.)
This is where your narrative is strategically short-sighted. It would be a very significant leverage point for their own proprietary content over the traditional media companies' - the kind of thing that 'disruption' is built on!
You can't tell me with a straight face that somehow they don't have this power.
DRM absolutely benefits them because it ensures that only parties they permit are allowed to access content, for the same reason it benefits other media companies.
The fact that every pi8ece of Netflix content is on the pirate sites within hours of release would prove otherwise. Netflix is well aware of the uselessness of DRM.
And you're right, they probably did negotiate DRM free licenses. But you missed the other part of my post -- the cost for implementing a separate DRM free pipeline was very high, and there would be little ROI to the business. Not having DRM on just the Netflix content would get very few new customers, if any. How many people would say "man I would totally sign up for Netflix if only their own content was DRM free, even though I'd need a DRM enabled player to play everything else, and oh yeah this only applies to web streaming anyway."
Whether or not they have a 4k display... that is probably the blocker. I have a 4k display but it's not my primary display (instead opting for a 165Hz 1440p panel) and I never bothered to buy a 4k TV, given how dirt-cheap high-end 1080p TVs are. Would much rather have the black blacks of a $500 1080p OLED TV than a $3000 washed-out 4k LCD.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...
Rather, focus on concrete steps you yourself can take:
1. Make sure the hostile black box is not available / disabled in your browser. So when you end up at a page that wants to use DRM and it doesn't work, you simply attribute the problem to the website being broken (which it is), and move on. If you do need to keep using the DRM crutch for now, then only use it on a separate dedicated browser or device.
2. Base your media setup around a DRM-free pipeline (eg Kodi). Make torrenting content your default. If you want to pay indie creators for DRM free downloads, feel free. But don't fund any studios that generally push DRM.
3. Share downloaded content with friends (eg USB drives), encouraging them to not fund Netflix et al developing and promulgating more DRM. This is especially relevant for "exclusive" releases that are meant to push people into signing up for yet another subscription.
More specifically, those associated with the MPAA and the RIAA.
Google/Microsoft/Apple/Adobe want to support
media content, but to do so requires towing
the line with the media companies
If it weren't for Google Play Movies and iTunes Movies they could have just told the MPAA companies to take a hike.
Does Netflix DRM even "work"? I've never personally seriously looked around for how to break it, but I note there are still plenty of people who seem to manage to review Netflix-based shows on YouTube with video clips of sufficient quality [1], and at least some of the reviewers in question I am fairly confident aren't getting any sort of privileged backdoor access or anything.
Is it "anyone can crack with a smidge of effort" or "it's really hard but it spreads once cracked"? I'm not asking for a lot of details of the crack per se, just general details of how successful it can be said to be in practice.
[1] I'm not claiming they aren't necessarily re-re-encoded by the time they get to me, but if they are, I can't tell for sure, so I'm going with "sufficient quality" as a description.
Actually they should be byte-for-byte copies, but generally aren't, since Netflix makes you jump through half a dozen hoops to get the highest quality streams, so pirated copies are actually much better quality than what you can get on Netflix.
I have had the 1080p one for 5 years.
The browser has to decrypt it somewhere along the line to play. Always was interested in tinkering around with it.
For a starting point I'd be going through chromium and checking out how they implement widevine.
For a while now there's been rumors in the torrent scene that a few people have broken it, but keep coy in case it gets patched. Then again it's trivial to screenrecord at the cost of time. Who knows?
Level 3 requires a secure path all the way to the display (so the decryption happens in a Trusted Execution Environment, the keys are stored in a Trusted Platform Module, and HDCP or similar to the display). Level 3 practically only exists on mobile currently, as Intel's SGX (their TEE) is typically disabled by default on what processors do support it.
And they did it for the worst reasons. Vanity and pride. The corporations pushing DRM are merely motivated by greed.
But the players in the OSS community that opened the door for DRM were TERRIFIED of being labeled as "obsolete" or losing pretend "market share". They refused to take a stand against DRM, if it meant losing any users. Just look at the discussion thread where Mozilla decided to support DRM.
The arguments in favor of DRM by the OSS community are always the same: - We need to support terrible DRM because it is popular (and being numerically popular is super important). - We need to compromise against our users because if we don't then we won't have any leverage (which we are conceding we don't have anyway) - "marketshare" - "integrated branding"(?)
None of this makes sense, because Google, Apple, and Microsoft have completely different goals with building for-profit forms.
People who speak in slimey business sales marketing speak are making decisions about the direction of OSS software. And these people are obsessed with cargo-culting the big commercial platforms.