Re:I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me
by jedberg on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @03:39PM
(#19557831)
They probably did negotiate DRM free licenses. But the cost for implementing a separate DRM free pipeline is 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, especially given that this whole argument only applies to web streaming anyway.
Re:I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me
by 0815test on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @03:52PM
(#19557936)
> ...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...
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!
(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.)