3 ms·

It seems to me that the approach Netflix and Disney et al are taking is accomplishing just that. DRM in the browser was step one. No Widevine, or whatever crap

It seems to me that the approach Netflix and Disney et al are taking is accomplishing just that. DRM in the browser was step one. No Widevine, or whatever crapware is needed, no Netflix. Next came the limit on higher resolutions. You want Full HD? Stop using a free operating system. You want 4k? Get Internet Explorer, or better yet, get our app on one of the approved operating systems. The next step is probably to diminish the browser experience even further until enough users have switched to the 'app'. The only reason is control. It won't drive us away from a personal computer running whatever modern OS we want, but it is slowly creating a majority of people for whom computing exclusively means a managed device with a pre-approved operating system running vetted proprietary applications.

hakfoo 7y ago
I suspect it will just bifurcate the market eventually. There was a brilliant moment where entertainment was all going to converge. You'd have your PC with terabytes of storage, stick a tuner card and an Ethernet cable in the back, run the sound out to your thousand-watt 20-channel amplifer, and display it all on your 70-inch flat screen. Broadcast TV, Netflix, Disney Plus, etc, would all just be desktop icons, right next to Steam and Excel. We were hurtling down that road in the mid-2000s (remember WinXP Media Centre Edition?) and suddenly it all jumped the track. Seemed to happen pretty close to when Digital TV stumbled its way into the US market, or roughly the perfect time for it to really take hold (the classic "record a show on VHS" paradigm was suddenly killed off, and the ever-mutating subchannel lineups makes a smarter electronic program guide and recording functionality more appealing). I sort of blame the cable industry-- apparently it was virtually impossible to get a digital-cable-compatible tuner card for many years-- you had to buy from a narrow band of prebuilt PCs with the cards preinstalled, and even now the companies will scream blue murder over having to supply CableCards (if they even do anymore). The PC is a do-anything device. Eventually, given the media industry's tastes, it will be the 'do anything except watch name-brand entertainment products' device. I don't think they can undermine general-purpose computing as a concept- there's too many other business cases that rely on being able to run random unsigned software or connect to arbitrary weird hardware. Instead, Disney and Sony will push hard for various consumption-first or -only devices-- smart TVs, consoles, locked down phones/tablets. I'm sort of surprised they aren't already going for the subsidy model-- get a "free" PS5/Xbox 3π/"smart" television if you'll sign up for years of a content subscription service to feed it. People will end up having both and being annoyed that they can't converge things.

hakfoo 7y ago

I suspect it will just bifurcate the market eventually. There was a brilliant moment where entertainment was all going to converge. You'd have your PC with terabytes of storage, stick a tuner card and an Ethernet cable in the back, run the sound out to your thousand-watt 20-channel amplifer, and display it all on your 70-inch flat screen. Broadcast TV, Netflix, Disney Plus, etc, would all just be desktop icons, right next to Steam and Excel. We were hurtling down that road in the mid-2000s (remember WinXP Media Centre Edition?) and suddenly it all jumped the track. Seemed to happen pretty close to when Digital TV stumbled its way into the US market, or roughly the perfect time for it to really take hold (the classic "record a show on VHS" paradigm was suddenly killed off, and the ever-mutating subchannel lineups makes a smarter electronic program guide and recording functionality more appealing). I sort of blame the cable industry-- apparently it was virtually impossible to get a digital-cable-compatible tuner card for many years-- you had to buy from a narrow band of prebuilt PCs with the cards preinstalled, and even now the companies will scream blue murder over having to supply CableCards (if they even do anymore). The PC is a do-anything device. Eventually, given the media industry's tastes, it will be the 'do anything except watch name-brand entertainment products' device. I don't think they can undermine general-purpose computing as a concept- there's too many other business cases that rely on being able to run random unsigned software or connect to arbitrary weird hardware. Instead, Disney and Sony will push hard for various consumption-first or -only devices-- smart TVs, consoles, locked down phones/tablets. I'm sort of surprised they aren't already going for the subsidy model-- get a "free" PS5/Xbox 3π/"smart" television if you'll sign up for years of a content subscription service to feed it. People will end up having both and being annoyed that they can't converge things.