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Not all internet users are Netflix subscribers. Installing Silverlight is fairly heavyweight, and a lot of people aren't willing to install something like that
by esrauch 12y ago
Not all internet users are Netflix subscribers. Installing Silverlight is fairly heavyweight, and a lot of people aren't willing to install something like that to watch some random cat video on a random website.
The net effect of this was that the average video on the internet was not DRM'd, and couldn't be without losing significant potential marketshare. Once all browsers natively support DRM this will likely change.
- mikeryan 12y agoInstalling Silverlight is fairly heavyweight, and a lot of people aren't willing to install something like that to watch some random cat video on a random website. Nonsense. Folks have installed Flash forever in order to watch cat videos. Youtube was Flash based and Flash has even been bundled with Chrome. If folks have wanted to DRM their cat videos they've had the ability and its not happened. Its not client side compatibility thats prevented this its that the DRM encoding and streaming costs and complexity that make this a poor choice for content providers.
- esrauch 12y agoThis is a delayed reply, but I really disagree. Flash has (had?) already won. Everyone already has it installed: almost all consumer computers have it installed by default and Chrome runs it without even having the adobe software installed. I think it is an absurd claim mistake that a random website running silverlight would have remotely the same view rate as one using flash. That delta cost more than outweighs the tiny benefit of DRM, and when everything is HTML5 video and DRM comes with actually zero cost to potential users it will be significantly more widespread.