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 A

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.