Re:Disney+ streaming uses draconian DRM
by matheusmoreira on Sunday October 20, 2019 @10:04PM
(#21308819)
People outside the United States have to suffer through all that for access to a subset of the full Netflix library. And Netflix is one of the better companies in that regard. Most of them simply tell me the content is "not available in my country". And when people ask them why, they have the gall to blame "piracy".
Ironicallly I think this is why the privacy 'war' can never be won by these corporations. I live in a small European country where even if you subscribe to Netflix, Amazon (which isn't officially available here), cable TV, and whatever else you can find, you still won't get a lot of new movies and shows that you may want to watch. The only way you can get them is by pirating them, so that's what people do.
The problem is piracy isnt geo-blocked, so if someone here pirates a movie and shares it, it's also available to someone in the US.
I'm not sure why they keep pushing these technical restrictions, when really the issue is they don't allow people to buy their content in the first place.
Yep, I couldn't agree more. I've tried subscribing to Amazon Prime purely for the shows/movies (not like we have next day shipping or something), and I couldn't find a single movie/show that's not geolocked. Not even their originals.
Ahaha, yes I should also mentioned I did all that to have access to netflix originals and little else.
Re:Disney+ streaming uses draconian DRM
by phist_mcgee on Sunday October 20, 2019 @09:31PM
(#21308667)
Well look at it from Netflix's perspective. You are in no way an indicative normal customer. They don't support certain browsers, because there is no need to. Privacy hiding VPNs are used to evade content locking as part of Netflix's business models/licensing agreements, so why would they allow your privacy hiding vpn? I'm not agreeing that they should do these things, but you are approaching a service from a very standpoint, and I can understand why your experience is less than optimal. Being a ubuntu/debian user you must have encountered this before righ ;)
yeah, I'm looking. Dude paid for the content with his credit card. Yet netflix still putting up hurdles after hurdles. No wonder dude ended up on piratebay.
If I buy something I expect goods delivered to me. app store, play store, GOG, steam, everything...
Re:Disney+ streaming uses draconian DRM
by shadowgovt on Sunday October 20, 2019 @10:44PM
(#21308953)
But to phist_mcgee's point, if Firefox-plus-VPN isn't a very common use-case, they can afford to eat the cost of that one dissatisfied customer.
I paid for this car but it doesn't works underwater, I been screwed so hard...
You can't support every use case sadly, whatever happens, some people won't be supported because of specific needs. It's sad for sure that not every market is big enough to be supported, but such is life.
At least it was during a trial and he didn't pay anything.
Look at it from Netflix’s perspective: most of their collection has legal strings attached, even most of their exclusives, with substantial penalties if they don’t take measures to encumber content and there’s a real threat of auditors catching implementation lapses. If they use HTML video with EME and someone comes up with a way to copy it, that’s a problem for Google’s Widevine (used by both Chrome and Firefox), Microsoft, Apple, etc. as long as they can show they used the system correctly. Similarly, they don’t need to be absolutely perfect in region locking as long as they can defend the mechanism in court. Similarly, VPN detection needs to be at the level where they have a good chance of avoiding a court case – auditors definitely know to try that.
Now ask how many Linux users running Firefox without the Widevine CDM installed over a VPN there are likely to be and how much revenue that brings in compared to the legal risks of not being able to check those boxes.
This reminds me of my very short foray into streaming services. I purchased a month of Netflix, or rather I got their 1 month trial, and opened the website to watch something. First it didn't open on Firefox, and they told me to install Chrom(ium). I didn't like it, but went away and `apt install`ed Chromium. Then it blocked my account because I was using a VPN. I liked this even less (I gave it a credit card number, so they know I'm not a bot or something using a VPN to hide traffic), but I still disabled my VPN. Mind that these two steps already cost me 45 minutes of browsing through FAQs and forums to figure out.
Then I finally open something, after installing proprietary software, a new browser, and disabling my privacy-protecting VPN. I'm presented with a video playing in glorious 1280x720 resolution. I just laughed to myself, closed the tab, and opened thepiratebay.org.
So let me get this straight. I'm paying for a service and I get headaches, restrictions upon restrictions, and mandatory malware, all for the privilege of watching gimped resolution content? Whereas if I went on piratebay I could get a 4K mkv file I can watch anywhere I want, no internet and no software required? You can fuck right off.
Strikes me as odd how anyone can describing paying for a shit service as "a balance between DRM and usability".