3 ms·

Because Silverlight is EOL and Netflix wants to continue to have a functioning business after Microsoft kills it?

• ihsw 13y ago
  They can continue functioning on their own, without polluting the HTML standard. There's nothing stopping them from that.
  • cheald 13y ago
    It's a fantasy to think that premium video providers are going away. It's also a fantasy to think that they're going to be able to provide content sans DRM anytime in the next decade. You can either have a standardized way of delivering this content that there is obviously a massive demand for, or you can have everyone that wants to deliver video implement their own shitty browser plugin that will undoubtedly be full of security holes and performance issues and require regular patching. Trading Flash/Silverlight for a proprietary binary plugin per platform sounds genuinely awful to me. It's been a massive uphill battle with Flash/Silverlight - expanding that to a plugin per platform would be a nightmare. The demand for the product is there. Maybe I'm just more pragmatic than idealistic, but as someone who enjoys these services, I'd really rather than they not suck. My primary complaint with DRM in general is the sucky customer experience, not the DRM itself. For streaming services, the classic issue with DRM ("you don't really own it") doesn't apply, because you already explicitly don't own what you're streaming. As long as it doesn't get in my way, I have no issue with it. Proprietary binaries are a lot more likely to get in my way than a standardized set of HTML5 extensions are.
    • ihsw 13y ago
      I never said that I thought they should 'go away' but what I'm saying is that they should mind their own business rather than trying to control everybody else's.
      • cheald 13y ago
        Whose business besides their own do you exactly think they're trying to control?
        • wmf 13y ago
          DRM systems have a habit of trying to push onerous requirements onto OSes and hardware.
          • cheald 13y ago
            I must have missed Netflix's HTML5 Palladium draft spec.
          • Silhouette 13y ago
            Doesn't that mean having a standardised, open, peer-reviewed system for isolating those onerous parts from the rest of the system would be an improvement?
    • Silhouette 13y ago
      My primary complaint with DRM in general is the sucky customer experience, not the DRM itself. Exactly. I do think there is a risk that it simply won't be possible to buy a legal permanent copy of a lot of content in a DRM'd era. More limited library subscription or streaming/rental models are likely to be more financially beneficial to content producers, and if the content is valuable enough, people will still pay for it on those terms. At the moment, I'm leaning towards saying that's OK if the market will bear it. A reasonably priced service where I can listen to just about any music track I want probably does have more value to me than owning a bunch of little plastic discs with a tiny fraction of the same material on them. At the same time, copyright is supposed to be a two-way street that motivates the creation and distribution of works for the general good. If the content producers can make a reasonable return much faster thanks to DRM, then it's also fair to say copyright terms should be dramatically shortened in this new environment, and maybe some form of positive obligation to release the content into the public domain should exist. This way, works can be produced and profitable faster for the benefit of creators, and then they can become public faster as well. Part of the trouble today is that the intent of copyright laws has been so distorted that they really do serve more as a means to lock works up than to motivate their distribution. But this was a problem already, legally speaking, so I don't see much downside to highlighting the issue so there is increased pressure to fix the underlying problem.
      • cheald 13y ago
        110% agreed.