7 ms·

We somehow got away from DRM on audio. I was wondering how to do this for video too. What worked for audio, was that you had one vendor (Apple) that had a lar

by derekp7 10y ago

We somehow got away from DRM on audio. I was wondering how to do this for video too. What worked for audio, was that you had one vendor (Apple) that had a large enough market share. In order to sell DRMd media that worked on Ipods, the media companies had to sell through Apple. Or they could sell non-DRMd files that would still work on Ipods. They did the calculation, and figured they would make more money going non-DRM so they can pick other distributors such as Amazon. For video, people don't download it and take it with them (typically), they either play from their computer or from a set top box or smart TV. So there is no market forces that would give the movie studios any incentive to do non-DRM.

xg15 10y ago
> What worked for audio, was that you had one vendor (Apple) that had a large enough market share. In order to sell DRMd media that worked on Ipods, the media companies had to sell through Apple. Or they could sell non-DRMd files that would still work on Ipods. Ironically, this scenario just got more unlikely, thanks to EME now being a standard and thus available for everyone... Hooray for web standards!
Silhouette 10y ago
We somehow got away from DRM on audio. We got away from it with audio in part because a typical audio product such as a music single or short audiobook can viably be produced and sold DRM-free at a price so low that it's hardly worth anyone looking for it elsewhere even if they could find it literally for free. Unfortunately, the same economics don't work in most other markets.
flukus 10y ago
Aren't music publishers a lot less consolidated than there movie/TV counterparts?
- yeukhon 10y ago
  Kinda of, but most labels find the big three for both production and distribution. There is independent distribution company within each of the big three to attract independent labels. Most labels come to the big three simply because they have the infrastructure in place for global distriubtion from marketing to production to music distriubtion to all the major DSP (digital service providers) such as Apple and Spotify, as well as ringtone. One interesting thing about music deal is that while the big three have the infrastructure and capability, for example WMG can sign a deal with Sony in terrority Y (a country or multiple countries) for the release of X there and they split the royality, and vice versa. I said kinda of because not all sign with big three and further more there are so many independent artists out there releasing to YouTube or Apple iTune or Soundcloud on their own). (Disclaimer: work in a music company)
eugeniub 10y ago
> We somehow got away from DRM on audio. Did we? Look at Apple Music, Spotify, and other subscription music services. They all have DRM.
- drdrey 10y ago
  But music you buy on iTunes is DRM-free. That's a significant step away from DRM.
  - josteink 10y ago
    > But music you buy on iTunes is DRM-free. That's a significant step away from DRM. And Amazon. And Google Play music. And band-camp. Etc etc. In fact, I don't know a single place on the entire internet which still sells DRMed music. Such a thing simply ceased to exist. Imagine if we could make the same happen for video. That would be real nice.
    - Twisell 10y ago
      Yes but in Netflix case and html5 we are precisely talking about streaming service. Download should be DRM free for free for vidéo that's true but don't blame Netflix for using DRM on a streaming service as every music streaming service does that too. Indeed I think studios could reduce pirating to baseline (people who can't afford anyway) in a split second should they understand that people are willing to pay for a fair priced streaming service like Netflix. They just need to open up their catalogs like music majors finally did as an average wallet can hardly sustain a dozen different subscriptions in order to have a decent movie catalog.
    - sneak 10y ago
      Nobody normal buys music and shuffles files around anymore. They all just switched to DRMed streaming services.
      - josteink 10y ago
        I think the entire Plex userbase would disagree. There's also a reason Google Play Music lets you upload your own music: Not all music can be found in "regular" streaming catalogs. Technicalities aside: Also I like to think that buying albums (even if I stream them later on) makes the artist more money. And I want to support the artists I appreciate as much as I can.
MBCook 10y ago
> We somehow got away from DRM on audio. Guess which industry watched how that happened REALLY REALLY closely? The music industry was falling apart by the time they gave up on DRM, the video industry is still very strong and had time to learn where all the mistakes were made that lead to DRM free content.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  The end of DRM for purchased music downloads was primarily driven by the need to break what the record industry perceived as a monopoly. They got in bed with Apple, and at first they were happy with that -- Apple showed that offering a legal way to download music would succeed, so long as it was A) convenient, B) had a suitably large catalog and C) was priced in a way customers saw as fair. And the result was Apple became a major player in the market, to the point that the record labels started getting scared of what Apple could now force them to do. So they needed to give Apple a competitor. Except... Apple wasn't about to license its Apple-specific DRM scheme to that competitor, and wasn't going to install the competitor's DRM scheme on Apple devices. Which left them with no way to introduce a serious competitor other than to go DRM-free so purchased music would be playable on all the popular devices, including Apple's. Thus, Amazon got to start selling DRM-free music (and eventually Apple got to sell it too). I suspect sooner or later the book industry will have to go DRM-free to break Amazon's ebook stranglehold, in much the same way. But video... is different. There isn't a monopolish player in the online video market. There are multiple competing services, some doing purchase and some doing temporary rental and some doing streaming and some doing combinations of multiple options, and there's nobody emerging with power to dictate to movie/TV studios the way Apple emerged in music or Amazon did in ebooks. Which suggests DRM on video is going to be with us for a while no matter what. And video is one area where I have some sympathy for attempts to control access: the video market is quite young compared to music or books, and has had the short-term rental as a key segment of its market for roughly as long as it's existed. And this makes some sense, as video content tends to have less long-term re-use value: listening to a song multiple times, and re-reading a book multiple times, both seem to be much more common than watching a movie multiple times. So providing a reduced-price option which limits the number of times or amount of time of watching makes business sense. I'm unsure how to reconcile that with hardcore anti-DRM positions, since some type of access control is necessary to enable a rental market.
jMyles 10y ago
> For video, people don't download it and take it with them (typically) ...which is crazy, especially for HD video. Why use the bandwidth every time you want to watch something when storage is so much cheaper?
- nsomaru 10y ago
  Guessing that it's probably more rare to watch something again than it is to watch something new.
- cstrahan 10y ago
  That's assuming people are going watch things multiple times. Most people, including myself, are one and done. I've always rented the movies I've watched because I know I won't watch them again, so the savings is win on the whole. I guess there's something to be said for TV shows, as people often watch those over. I generally don't watch TV series, the exception being a couple Netflix series that friends have begged me to watch, so I don't have too much of an opinion there.
- kriro 10y ago
  I'd say this is false. I'd love to watch more videos when I commute. My Pay TV provider even offers a download option for their streaming sub service(DRMed and self destructing after X days I think, never tried it) which would indicate that there's certainly market demand for it.
  - hsivonen 10y ago
    Download as in "cache this title within this app for viewing in an environment where Internet connectivity doesn't work well yet" is very different from download as in "here's an .mp4/.webm file for you to hold onto for ever--have fun taking backups and figuring out which third party player can handle the subtitles. Fun story: Not very long ago, I bought a copy of a documentary using the latter model. Another person with whom I was going to watch the documentary had visited their site and seen what movie services it was on. I trusted that info at first without checking the documentary's own site. I got very annoyed about the movie services having the title geoblocked in my country (even when a movie service had presence here and in a neighboring country and the rights for both countries are typically sold as a bundle and the neighboring country had it available!). Then I looked at the site of the documentary myself. And indeed, for the price of the Blu-Ray version, I could buy a full-HD .mp4 without DRM to download. So I paid and downloaded the .mp4 plus .mp4s for all the Blu-Ray extras. And I downloaded a .srt file for the subtitles. The Linux box I had connected to my TV couldn't do full HD well in software but could via VAAPI. However, the player that supported VAAPI was supposed to support .srt but didn't actually support at least this .srt file. In the end, we watched it by pluggin in a more performant Windows laptop doing the whole thing in software. Conclusion: This is what we always said we wanted. However, when it was there, I didn't expect it to be there and assumed I had to find the title on one of the big-name services instead of navigating to the documentary's own site. The UX of getting stuff to work was less smooth than with the locked-down streaming services.
cletus 10y ago
You can thank Steve Jobs for that. When digital music downloads started record companies demanded DRM. They agreed to a model with iTunes of $0.99 per song. They chafed against this model and wanted pricing tiers. Jobs was willing to give them this but the price was to go DRM free. Jobs could get away with this for two reasons. First, he was Steve Jobs. Second, the record industry had unwittingly created a virtual music download monopoly in iTunes. I personally use Spotify because streaming is incredibly convenient and there isn't much you can buy but can't stream. I use Netflix and Ahbo Now for the same reason. I'd never "buy" DRMed content so music would be fine. Video not so much. I personally don't have as much of an issue with DRM on streaming content.
- dchest 10y ago
  Contrary opinion from a former Apple employee: "The music industry didn't go DRM free because they hated DRM; they went DRM free because they were fearful of the leverage Apple was gaining with their iTunes + FairPlay + iPod combination. Apple’s DRM created this lock, and it became so successful that the music industry went with the lesser of two evils (songs locked to Apple’s iPod monopoly vs. the distribution of DRM-free music) and chose to distribute DRM-free music... http://fortune.com/2014/12/14/re-thinking-steve-jobs-thoughts-on-music-8-years-later/ http://fortune.com/2014/12/14/re-thinking-steve-jobs-thought... You say "Jobs was willing to give them this but the price was to go DRM free", but why would he do that if DRM was good for Apple, it's what locked this market to iPods? Doesn't make sense to me. The music industry had to go DRM free (with Amazon, for example) because that was the only alternative way to sell music that would play on iPods.
  - lloeki 10y ago
    > You say "Jobs was willing to give them this but the price was to go DRM free", but why would he do that if DRM was good for Apple, it's what locked this market to iPods? Here goes a ~10yo tidbit from SJ [0]. Whether you take it at face value, see it as a PR trick, or anything in between is up to you. > Apple was able to negotiate landmark usage rights at the time, which include allowing users to play their DRM protected music on up to 5 computers and on an unlimited number of iPods. Obtaining such rights from the music companies was unprecedented at the time, and even today is unmatched by most other digital music services. However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store. > [...] only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music. > The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. > Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080107121341/http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080107121341/http://www.apple....
canibal 10y ago
>For video, people don't download it and take it with them If this is so, why would Netflix have JUST added the download feature last quarter? Obviously there's some demand for storage-based playback.

by derekp7 10y ago

xg15 10y ago

> What worked for audio, was that you had one vendor (Apple) that had a large enough market share. In order to sell DRMd media that worked on Ipods, the media companies had to sell through Apple. Or they could sell non-DRMd files that would still work on Ipods. Ironically, this scenario just got more unlikely, thanks to EME now being a standard and thus available for everyone... Hooray for web standards!

Silhouette 10y ago

We somehow got away from DRM on audio. We got away from it with audio in part because a typical audio product such as a music single or short audiobook can viably be produced and sold DRM-free at a price so low that it's hardly worth anyone looking for it elsewhere even if they could find it literally for free. Unfortunately, the same economics don't work in most other markets.

flukus 10y ago

Aren't music publishers a lot less consolidated than there movie/TV counterparts?

yeukhon 10y ago
Kinda of, but most labels find the big three for both production and distribution. There is independent distribution company within each of the big three to attract independent labels. Most labels come to the big three simply because they have the infrastructure in place for global distriubtion from marketing to production to music distriubtion to all the major DSP (digital service providers) such as Apple and Spotify, as well as ringtone. One interesting thing about music deal is that while the big three have the infrastructure and capability, for example WMG can sign a deal with Sony in terrority Y (a country or multiple countries) for the release of X there and they split the royality, and vice versa. I said kinda of because not all sign with big three and further more there are so many independent artists out there releasing to YouTube or Apple iTune or Soundcloud on their own). (Disclaimer: work in a music company)

eugeniub 10y ago

> We somehow got away from DRM on audio. Did we? Look at Apple Music, Spotify, and other subscription music services. They all have DRM.

drdrey 10y ago
But music you buy on iTunes is DRM-free. That's a significant step away from DRM.
- josteink 10y ago
  > But music you buy on iTunes is DRM-free. That's a significant step away from DRM. And Amazon. And Google Play music. And band-camp. Etc etc. In fact, I don't know a single place on the entire internet which still sells DRMed music. Such a thing simply ceased to exist. Imagine if we could make the same happen for video. That would be real nice.
  - Twisell 10y ago
    Yes but in Netflix case and html5 we are precisely talking about streaming service. Download should be DRM free for free for vidéo that's true but don't blame Netflix for using DRM on a streaming service as every music streaming service does that too. Indeed I think studios could reduce pirating to baseline (people who can't afford anyway) in a split second should they understand that people are willing to pay for a fair priced streaming service like Netflix. They just need to open up their catalogs like music majors finally did as an average wallet can hardly sustain a dozen different subscriptions in order to have a decent movie catalog.
  - sneak 10y ago
    Nobody normal buys music and shuffles files around anymore. They all just switched to DRMed streaming services.
    - josteink 10y ago
      I think the entire Plex userbase would disagree. There's also a reason Google Play Music lets you upload your own music: Not all music can be found in "regular" streaming catalogs. Technicalities aside: Also I like to think that buying albums (even if I stream them later on) makes the artist more money. And I want to support the artists I appreciate as much as I can.

MBCook 10y ago

> We somehow got away from DRM on audio. Guess which industry watched how that happened REALLY REALLY closely? The music industry was falling apart by the time they gave up on DRM, the video industry is still very strong and had time to learn where all the mistakes were made that lead to DRM free content.

ubernostrum 10y ago
The end of DRM for purchased music downloads was primarily driven by the need to break what the record industry perceived as a monopoly. They got in bed with Apple, and at first they were happy with that -- Apple showed that offering a legal way to download music would succeed, so long as it was A) convenient, B) had a suitably large catalog and C) was priced in a way customers saw as fair. And the result was Apple became a major player in the market, to the point that the record labels started getting scared of what Apple could now force them to do. So they needed to give Apple a competitor. Except... Apple wasn't about to license its Apple-specific DRM scheme to that competitor, and wasn't going to install the competitor's DRM scheme on Apple devices. Which left them with no way to introduce a serious competitor other than to go DRM-free so purchased music would be playable on all the popular devices, including Apple's. Thus, Amazon got to start selling DRM-free music (and eventually Apple got to sell it too). I suspect sooner or later the book industry will have to go DRM-free to break Amazon's ebook stranglehold, in much the same way. But video... is different. There isn't a monopolish player in the online video market. There are multiple competing services, some doing purchase and some doing temporary rental and some doing streaming and some doing combinations of multiple options, and there's nobody emerging with power to dictate to movie/TV studios the way Apple emerged in music or Amazon did in ebooks. Which suggests DRM on video is going to be with us for a while no matter what. And video is one area where I have some sympathy for attempts to control access: the video market is quite young compared to music or books, and has had the short-term rental as a key segment of its market for roughly as long as it's existed. And this makes some sense, as video content tends to have less long-term re-use value: listening to a song multiple times, and re-reading a book multiple times, both seem to be much more common than watching a movie multiple times. So providing a reduced-price option which limits the number of times or amount of time of watching makes business sense. I'm unsure how to reconcile that with hardcore anti-DRM positions, since some type of access control is necessary to enable a rental market.

jMyles 10y ago

> For video, people don't download it and take it with them (typically) ...which is crazy, especially for HD video. Why use the bandwidth every time you want to watch something when storage is so much cheaper?

nsomaru 10y ago
Guessing that it's probably more rare to watch something again than it is to watch something new.
cstrahan 10y ago
That's assuming people are going watch things multiple times. Most people, including myself, are one and done. I've always rented the movies I've watched because I know I won't watch them again, so the savings is win on the whole. I guess there's something to be said for TV shows, as people often watch those over. I generally don't watch TV series, the exception being a couple Netflix series that friends have begged me to watch, so I don't have too much of an opinion there.
kriro 10y ago
I'd say this is false. I'd love to watch more videos when I commute. My Pay TV provider even offers a download option for their streaming sub service(DRMed and self destructing after X days I think, never tried it) which would indicate that there's certainly market demand for it.
- hsivonen 10y ago
  Download as in "cache this title within this app for viewing in an environment where Internet connectivity doesn't work well yet" is very different from download as in "here's an .mp4/.webm file for you to hold onto for ever--have fun taking backups and figuring out which third party player can handle the subtitles. Fun story: Not very long ago, I bought a copy of a documentary using the latter model. Another person with whom I was going to watch the documentary had visited their site and seen what movie services it was on. I trusted that info at first without checking the documentary's own site. I got very annoyed about the movie services having the title geoblocked in my country (even when a movie service had presence here and in a neighboring country and the rights for both countries are typically sold as a bundle and the neighboring country had it available!). Then I looked at the site of the documentary myself. And indeed, for the price of the Blu-Ray version, I could buy a full-HD .mp4 without DRM to download. So I paid and downloaded the .mp4 plus .mp4s for all the Blu-Ray extras. And I downloaded a .srt file for the subtitles. The Linux box I had connected to my TV couldn't do full HD well in software but could via VAAPI. However, the player that supported VAAPI was supposed to support .srt but didn't actually support at least this .srt file. In the end, we watched it by pluggin in a more performant Windows laptop doing the whole thing in software. Conclusion: This is what we always said we wanted. However, when it was there, I didn't expect it to be there and assumed I had to find the title on one of the big-name services instead of navigating to the documentary's own site. The UX of getting stuff to work was less smooth than with the locked-down streaming services.

cletus 10y ago

You can thank Steve Jobs for that. When digital music downloads started record companies demanded DRM. They agreed to a model with iTunes of $0.99 per song. They chafed against this model and wanted pricing tiers. Jobs was willing to give them this but the price was to go DRM free. Jobs could get away with this for two reasons. First, he was Steve Jobs. Second, the record industry had unwittingly created a virtual music download monopoly in iTunes. I personally use Spotify because streaming is incredibly convenient and there isn't much you can buy but can't stream. I use Netflix and Ahbo Now for the same reason. I'd never "buy" DRMed content so music would be fine. Video not so much. I personally don't have as much of an issue with DRM on streaming content.

dchest 10y ago
Contrary opinion from a former Apple employee: "The music industry didn't go DRM free because they hated DRM; they went DRM free because they were fearful of the leverage Apple was gaining with their iTunes + FairPlay + iPod combination. Apple’s DRM created this lock, and it became so successful that the music industry went with the lesser of two evils (songs locked to Apple’s iPod monopoly vs. the distribution of DRM-free music) and chose to distribute DRM-free music... http://fortune.com/2014/12/14/re-thinking-steve-jobs-thoughts-on-music-8-years-later/ http://fortune.com/2014/12/14/re-thinking-steve-jobs-thought... You say "Jobs was willing to give them this but the price was to go DRM free", but why would he do that if DRM was good for Apple, it's what locked this market to iPods? Doesn't make sense to me. The music industry had to go DRM free (with Amazon, for example) because that was the only alternative way to sell music that would play on iPods.
- lloeki 10y ago
  > You say "Jobs was willing to give them this but the price was to go DRM free", but why would he do that if DRM was good for Apple, it's what locked this market to iPods? Here goes a ~10yo tidbit from SJ [0]. Whether you take it at face value, see it as a PR trick, or anything in between is up to you. > Apple was able to negotiate landmark usage rights at the time, which include allowing users to play their DRM protected music on up to 5 computers and on an unlimited number of iPods. Obtaining such rights from the music companies was unprecedented at the time, and even today is unmatched by most other digital music services. However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store. > [...] only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music. > The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. > Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080107121341/http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080107121341/http://www.apple....

canibal 10y ago

>For video, people don't download it and take it with them If this is so, why would Netflix have JUST added the download feature last quarter? Obviously there's some demand for storage-based playback.