6 ms·

^^^ great comment. hard to imagine a better synposis of 4k DRM in ~2 grafs. thanks!

gorkish 2y ago
Not mentioned above, but should be noted that all of this DRM is still only protecting the compressed and encoded video content. Schemes to protect the uncompressed digital video data are all permanently and universally broken or bypassed. The 'analog hole' has gone fully digital. One would think that alone would be enough to seal the deal on the pointlessness of DRM, but unfortunately there are a lot of gullible execs out there that want to keep pouring money on the fire.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  As long as it stops even 100,000 people from not downloading videos off of Netflix, from an executive’s perspective, it pays for itself. To them, it’s like saying Speed Limit signs are useless, because cars can go faster than the number posted by literally pressing a button. That’s not the point.
  - gorkish 2y ago
    If you take the capitalistic lust of the corporate executive to its logical extreme, given the massive costs of the DRM tech you'd think that at least one of them would realize that they could make more money if they didn't have to pay for something that doesn't work. The economics of distributing the copies are such that it doesn't actually matter if it's easy or hard for 1 or 100,000 people to break the protection.
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
      I can get DRM, right now, for my videos, with 500,000 plays for $1665. That’s publicly available, commercial pricing. That’s a third of a cent per play. At Netflix scale, it’s probably cheaper. DRM is a drop in the bucket compared to normal costs. A Netflix subscription is, what, $10? That’s enough to pay for 3,300 encrypted plays. The same provider, if I was doing over 10,000,000 plays, will drop it to just under one tenth of a cent per play, enough for over 10,000 encrypted plays. Compare that with how much the internet bandwidth, storage, and distribution costs - and the DRM is a rounding error. You’re seriously telling me that not even one out of 10,000 plays is going to attempt a serious theft, to share it with random friends and family? Hah, it’s probably closer to 5 in 100. Believe me - I’m not a guy who defines himself by living in a Hacker News bubble where everything needs to be perfect to be effective. I’d have DRM yesterday if I ran a streaming service, just like my copyright filings and the deadbolt on my front door.
      - temac 2y ago
        Sharing with friend and family is not "serious theft". It is benevolent and what people do with books and DVD, without industry people becoming insane about.
        gjsman-1000 2y ago
        I meant sending copies; where the next thing you know one purchased copy becomes thirty people holding copies.
    - repelsteeltje 2y ago
      I agree, DRM has significant costs. Consider you've encoded and packaged your mezzanine into ABR (dash, HLS) and it's working on phones, browsers, smart TVs, STBs etc. Now you add common encryption: repackage and get double the number of tracks (CENC as well as CBCS). You buy your licenses from Apple (Fairplay), Google (Widevine), Microsoft (Playready) and Marlin (old crap). What used to "just work" now has all kinds of subtle interop problems. Audio sync issues on iPad? Ah, Apple pushed a bad firmware update, thank you. Tomorrow it's users complaining about Widevine in Firefox. Only Netflix, maybe Disney+ — the biggest of the biggest can do streaming with DRM and make a profit.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      I think DRM works fine for the actual customers, the companies that are distributing video who need to convince the movie producers that they are taking it all very seriously, so they need to check some “our platform uses DRM” box. It all looks very odd from us downstream. But, still, most people don’t break DRM so it must be doing something. For a long time the industry worked by shipping movies off the theaters, to be run in projection room secured by kids doing after-school jobs. I think they aren’t concerned with perfection.
    - bobdvb 2y ago
      I work for a large streaming service and a significant part of my work is content protection. Honestly, tech folks misunderstanding of DRM and content protection is significant. There's some assumption that people are inherently honest and that we're just money grabbing. In the years that I've been doing this I've seen a lot of things and nothing has convinced me that if we turned off DRM we'd: 1) save money 2) not have issues with piracy proliferation The cost of DRM license issuing for our company is relatively insignificant, a year's worth of DRM for millions of users is less than the cost of a single show we might make. We pay cents per thousands of plays. I recall we launched in a new market, we did a show which would have been an expensive PPV previously, but it was included in our standard subscription. We also offered a first month free trial, which you could cancel. So, you could enjoy it at zero cost, from the original provider in high quality, with no commitment. That night our anti-piracy team took down 20,000+ illegal streams, serving a large audience. I also acutely know that DRM isn't as secure as we'd like, I know that all security measures are ultimately not anywhere near perfect. But you know what? I also lock my front door, even though I know how to pick locks. I put my car keys in a RFID box, despite knowing there are probably CAN attacks against my car. I still need to protect my assets, because enough people don't want to pay for something if they can get it for free. We had some research into the attitudes of pirates that basically distils down to: 1) 1/3rd would pay if they couldn't get the content any other way 2) 1/3rd don't care enough and are casual pirates, watching because they can. 3) 1/3rd are "pay never", militant, yet still happy to take my work without concern for the sustainability of that. Ultimately, if you like content then you should pay for it, but it's always a waste of time arguing about this on the internet because so many people are in the third category, think I'm an asshole for doing my job and apparently they know my job better than I do.
      - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
        That's all beside the point. Hardware belongs to the user and should be under the user's control. Treacherous computing should be highly taboo and illegal. The "sustainability" of Disney's profits are not important. To suggest otherwise on a site literally named Hacker News is comical.
        2y ago
  - xyzzy123 2y ago
    Yes if a particular group gets to externalise / socialise the costs of maintaining a protection then obviously from the perspective of the protected group then it's worth it. The question is, is it good for society overall. Who or what is being protected and what impact does that have on everyone else? Speed limit / stop signs represent a decent point of discussion I think.
    - pas 2y ago
      Speed limit signals danger, right? Does DRM signal an ethical dilemma? And if yes, what does it mean considering that each year we lose millions of people on the roads. (To fatalities and horrific injuries resulting in permanent disabilities.) Yet the majority doesn't care?
    - sureIy 2y ago
      > The question is, is it good for society overall. That’s not what execs ask at all. I don’t know where you’re living. The existence of DRM is not in any way related to society. Their analysts say it’s a net positive on their balance sheets, so DRM is here. Everything else is baseless speculation.
    - dialup_sounds 2y ago
      There is no "particular group" or "everyone else". Everyone has rights over their own creative work, even if that's mildly inconvenient to others. It's part of the social contract of modern society.
      - int_19h 2y ago
        The people who profit from all this are mostly not those who can claim that it is their own creative work.
        dialup_sounds 2y ago
        Finish the thought. How do they profit from someone else's creative work? Is it a) by just taking it because they can? or b) by mutual agreement with the original creator?

Not mentioned above, but should be noted that all of this DRM is still only protecting the compressed and encoded video content. Schemes to protect the uncompressed digital video data are all permanently and universally broken or bypassed. The 'analog hole' has gone fully digital. One would think that alone would be enough to seal the deal on the pointlessness of DRM, but unfortunately there are a lot of gullible execs out there that want to keep pouring money on the fire.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
As long as it stops even 100,000 people from not downloading videos off of Netflix, from an executive’s perspective, it pays for itself. To them, it’s like saying Speed Limit signs are useless, because cars can go faster than the number posted by literally pressing a button. That’s not the point.
- gorkish 2y ago
  If you take the capitalistic lust of the corporate executive to its logical extreme, given the massive costs of the DRM tech you'd think that at least one of them would realize that they could make more money if they didn't have to pay for something that doesn't work. The economics of distributing the copies are such that it doesn't actually matter if it's easy or hard for 1 or 100,000 people to break the protection.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    I can get DRM, right now, for my videos, with 500,000 plays for $1665. That’s publicly available, commercial pricing. That’s a third of a cent per play. At Netflix scale, it’s probably cheaper. DRM is a drop in the bucket compared to normal costs. A Netflix subscription is, what, $10? That’s enough to pay for 3,300 encrypted plays. The same provider, if I was doing over 10,000,000 plays, will drop it to just under one tenth of a cent per play, enough for over 10,000 encrypted plays. Compare that with how much the internet bandwidth, storage, and distribution costs - and the DRM is a rounding error. You’re seriously telling me that not even one out of 10,000 plays is going to attempt a serious theft, to share it with random friends and family? Hah, it’s probably closer to 5 in 100. Believe me - I’m not a guy who defines himself by living in a Hacker News bubble where everything needs to be perfect to be effective. I’d have DRM yesterday if I ran a streaming service, just like my copyright filings and the deadbolt on my front door.
    - temac 2y ago
      Sharing with friend and family is not "serious theft". It is benevolent and what people do with books and DVD, without industry people becoming insane about.
      - gjsman-1000 2y ago
        I meant sending copies; where the next thing you know one purchased copy becomes thirty people holding copies.
  - repelsteeltje 2y ago
    I agree, DRM has significant costs. Consider you've encoded and packaged your mezzanine into ABR (dash, HLS) and it's working on phones, browsers, smart TVs, STBs etc. Now you add common encryption: repackage and get double the number of tracks (CENC as well as CBCS). You buy your licenses from Apple (Fairplay), Google (Widevine), Microsoft (Playready) and Marlin (old crap). What used to "just work" now has all kinds of subtle interop problems. Audio sync issues on iPad? Ah, Apple pushed a bad firmware update, thank you. Tomorrow it's users complaining about Widevine in Firefox. Only Netflix, maybe Disney+ — the biggest of the biggest can do streaming with DRM and make a profit.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    I think DRM works fine for the actual customers, the companies that are distributing video who need to convince the movie producers that they are taking it all very seriously, so they need to check some “our platform uses DRM” box. It all looks very odd from us downstream. But, still, most people don’t break DRM so it must be doing something. For a long time the industry worked by shipping movies off the theaters, to be run in projection room secured by kids doing after-school jobs. I think they aren’t concerned with perfection.
  - bobdvb 2y ago
    I work for a large streaming service and a significant part of my work is content protection. Honestly, tech folks misunderstanding of DRM and content protection is significant. There's some assumption that people are inherently honest and that we're just money grabbing. In the years that I've been doing this I've seen a lot of things and nothing has convinced me that if we turned off DRM we'd: 1) save money 2) not have issues with piracy proliferation The cost of DRM license issuing for our company is relatively insignificant, a year's worth of DRM for millions of users is less than the cost of a single show we might make. We pay cents per thousands of plays. I recall we launched in a new market, we did a show which would have been an expensive PPV previously, but it was included in our standard subscription. We also offered a first month free trial, which you could cancel. So, you could enjoy it at zero cost, from the original provider in high quality, with no commitment. That night our anti-piracy team took down 20,000+ illegal streams, serving a large audience. I also acutely know that DRM isn't as secure as we'd like, I know that all security measures are ultimately not anywhere near perfect. But you know what? I also lock my front door, even though I know how to pick locks. I put my car keys in a RFID box, despite knowing there are probably CAN attacks against my car. I still need to protect my assets, because enough people don't want to pay for something if they can get it for free. We had some research into the attitudes of pirates that basically distils down to: 1) 1/3rd would pay if they couldn't get the content any other way 2) 1/3rd don't care enough and are casual pirates, watching because they can. 3) 1/3rd are "pay never", militant, yet still happy to take my work without concern for the sustainability of that. Ultimately, if you like content then you should pay for it, but it's always a waste of time arguing about this on the internet because so many people are in the third category, think I'm an asshole for doing my job and apparently they know my job better than I do.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      That's all beside the point. Hardware belongs to the user and should be under the user's control. Treacherous computing should be highly taboo and illegal. The "sustainability" of Disney's profits are not important. To suggest otherwise on a site literally named Hacker News is comical.
      - 2y ago
- xyzzy123 2y ago
  Yes if a particular group gets to externalise / socialise the costs of maintaining a protection then obviously from the perspective of the protected group then it's worth it. The question is, is it good for society overall. Who or what is being protected and what impact does that have on everyone else? Speed limit / stop signs represent a decent point of discussion I think.
  - pas 2y ago
    Speed limit signals danger, right? Does DRM signal an ethical dilemma? And if yes, what does it mean considering that each year we lose millions of people on the roads. (To fatalities and horrific injuries resulting in permanent disabilities.) Yet the majority doesn't care?
  - sureIy 2y ago
    > The question is, is it good for society overall. That’s not what execs ask at all. I don’t know where you’re living. The existence of DRM is not in any way related to society. Their analysts say it’s a net positive on their balance sheets, so DRM is here. Everything else is baseless speculation.
  - dialup_sounds 2y ago
    There is no "particular group" or "everyone else". Everyone has rights over their own creative work, even if that's mildly inconvenient to others. It's part of the social contract of modern society.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      The people who profit from all this are mostly not those who can claim that it is their own creative work.
      - dialup_sounds 2y ago
        Finish the thought. How do they profit from someone else's creative work? Is it a) by just taking it because they can? or b) by mutual agreement with the original creator?