Yeah, that was badly worded on my part. I meant that they have to degrade HDCP content if it's not being played through HDCP. Note that any combination of {grap

Yeah, that was badly worded on my part. I meant that they have to degrade HDCP content if it's not being played through HDCP. Note that any combination of {graphics card,HDMI controller,OS,browser,monitor} may result in not being able to play HDCP content and thus your quality being degraded. The point stands that the reason for doing the degradation in that instance is because of DRM and not because of technical issues. I personally am not sure how I feel about artificially removing the ability to access high-quality streams based on the current machine I'm accessing a site over (which is what GP was talking about) -- it feels user-hostile because if I want to download the stream then I can't download it in any quality available. But it's not as bad as full-blown DRM. My mentioning of DRM was to point out that not all auto-degradation is benign.