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I hear what the proponents of non-DRM browsers are saying, but for media streaming companies content is their bread and butter. I am not sure what the alternati

• bobajeff 12y ago
  Actually, for most online video sites users are their bread and butter. (Since they are ad supported) In fact users also provide the content in most cases.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• vlad003 12y ago
  I'm not sure what the benefit of HTML5 video is if you still end up being forced to use some proprietary component. You ditch Flash but now you have to run some DRM software. And there's so much more to HTML5 than video; I disagree that lack of DRM video support would set the rest of HTML5 back in any way. EDIT: I guess the sandboxing aspect of EME is a significant improvement over Flash running as a plugin.
  • notatoad 12y ago
    The benefits of html5 video are practical ones: it simply works better than flash does. It plays without stuttering, the audio works properly, it doesn't steal my mouse focus. Also, it doesn't get webcam permissions by default, or all the other crap that comes along with flash. Sure, its still DRM, but flash was terrible for plenty of reasons that aren't DRM.
    • tracker1 12y ago
      Which is funny, because flash was also great for creating content... If you were building learning demos or content, flash is still better than having to hand-code an alternative with html+svg+js... Though one of my early hopes when Adobe bought macromedia was that they'd push the authoring tool to export an archive file (similar to xaml) that would contain a manifest along with svg and javascript as a bundle. That never really happened though... I still hope that now it can. I know a lot of elearning content creators that really miss being able to use flash for most things... yeah, the player was horrible, and the formats sucked.. but the content creation experience was so nice. Creating data driven projects with Flex wasn't bad either.
  • spyder 12y ago
    HTML5 video works on phones and tablets
    • ris 12y ago
      But with EME it will only work on those phones and tablets which are running on an architecture and platform that the EME CDM has chosen to bother supporting. So it's pretty much as bad as flash.
      • spdustin 12y ago
        And blu-ray only works on blu-ray players, not Motorola StarTACs. I don't get most of the arguments on this thread. And I'm very much on the fence about DRM as a producer of licensed content, and a consumer of it.
        • aikah 12y ago
          And video file formats are not physical objects you put in a physical disc player. False equivalence makes your point idiotic. Hard to believe how customers are willing to accept more and more of this bullshit, vendors did a great job at brainwashing them.
          • spdustin 12y ago
            And you don't own those intangible things, you license them, so how is it you expect to be able to do MORE than the average consumer of a tangible product like a blu-ray? It's not a false equivalence fallacy when the alternate argument only inverts the parameters while violating the same logical foundation. And it's insulting to suggest I (or anyone else) have been brainwashed because my world view is a bit more pragmatic than, "give me all the rights." I'll eat the down votes for that, no problem, because this shouldn't be an adversarial debate between producers and consumers. There may be better ways to approach acknowledging producer rights and consumer usage, even if the consumers who feel their rights are violated are outnumbered by those who have no problem. Sure, the argument could be made, "if only they knew how their rights are being violated!" That argument could be made about any number of situations where one class feels like they need to lift up another one. And it's just as meaningless unless you do something to change the situation. DRM is evil, blah blah blah, I get it, as a consumer, I do. I also get that there are arguments for DRM that are perfectly valid from the point of view of the producer, even if the consumer thinks that the producer is off his nut. Surely there are people out there on HN who aren't so polarized by this issue? Sometimes, it feels like the US Congress in here.
• awalton 12y ago
  > I hear what the proponents of non-DRM browsers are saying, but for media streaming companies content is their bread and butter. I am not sure what the alternatives are. And the DRM does absolutely nothing to stop anyone from doing whatever they want with it. DRM punishes paying customers at the expense of being a slight pain-in-the-ass for pirates. Plain and simple: they delivered content to my computer and I have a key to decrypt it - there's nothing stopping me from doing whatever I want with those bits but the time to break their silly DRM scheme. Had Apple, Google, Netflix et al. the backbone enough to stand up to the media companies, we'd never have been inflicted with such stupidity. Now, Google's taking it upon themselves to start using their own DRM module with their own media - so much for the company that prided itself on Do No Evil.
  • sounds 12y ago
    Great argument. One point, though: it's "Don't be evil." Are you able to say you "do no evil"?
  • geofft 12y ago
    How is that punishing a paying customer? It's a quirk of classical information theory that you can't transmit a piece of data for a limited period of time. As an approximation, they apply a silly DRM scheme that takes time to break, and ask customers if they are willing to pay for time-limited access. Unlike with DRM on music downloads or (worse) physical copies of software or games, there's no expectations mismatch here. If you sell a download, the average buyer expects to be able to copy that download, etc. If you stream a movie, the average buyer no more expects to be able to retain a copy than the average movie-ticket holder does. They didn't think they paid for a copy of those bits for all time. There's nothing stopping someone who visits a movie theater from doing whatever they want with those photons, other than the time to build a sufficiently concealed camera, is there? And pirates do show up to movie premieres with concealed cameras... but would you argue that the security guards stopping you from carrying in a giant camcorder are "punishing paying customers" while not effectively deterring pirates?
    • aikah 12y ago
      How is that punishing a paying customer? You must be young, forgetting about formats like WMV or WMA where you couldn't open the file without the proper license installed on your computer.That's what DRM is about.And of course you needed to log to a server regularly to renew the license, or you couldn't listen or watch the media anymore. Just like games, pirates don't have issues with online license verification,since they play pirated games that got rid of them. Obviously vendors did a nice job not only brainwashing the legislator but also the client.
• pjmlp 12y ago
  So what, what guarantees you get a EME module of your OS of choice?
  • hsivonen 12y ago
    Nothing.
• thristian 12y ago
  Over thousands of years of human history, new technologies have changed the ways people communicate, from language to writing to the printing press, and so on. Every change shifted the economic balance, so things that once were prohibitively expensive became easy, and people who derived economic benefit from former scarcity became disadvantaged. I hear what the proponents of DRM-encumbered browsers are saying - media streaming companies control huge chunks of our popular culture, and significant political power, and it's expedient to give in to their demands and stop threatening their business model. But when I look back at the last thousands years of technological progress, I cannot bring myself to say "yes, this is good enough. We should legislatively freeze our technology at early-21st-century levels forever." Our civilisation has benefited from technology so much already, I can't in good conscience deny people the benefits of future technology, even in exchange for the right to stream Game of Thrones.
  • anigbrowl 12y ago
    Media producing companies that have no way of safeguarding their revenue stream would like the technical threshold for copying to be at least a minor deterrent, because otherwise people have no incentive to pay them; many many people are in fact OK with being freeloaders. I'm so sick of seeing Game of Thrones offered as the standard example. Sure, HBO has more more money than any of us would know what to do with. I, on the other hand, make my living working on films with budgets that only amount to a few hundreds of thousands of dollars, and believe me that does not go very far - the lower cost of digital vs. celluloid film is only one line item in the production process, whereas you still have to pay for locations, costumes, props, housing, transport, food, lighting, and a whole bunch of other things before you even get to handing out any wages. It's very, very hard to monetize a low-budget film. And there's constant downward pressure on production budgets, because indie films don't usually have fat box-office payoffs, and instead depend on small-scale releases in festivals and the art-house cinema circuit, followed by (you hope) some international box office and (you really hope) a long tail of DVD/streaming sales. And that long tail is highly vulnerable to piracy, and the existence of piracy is a big deterrent to investors. So when you're saying Big Studio makes enough money with their latest superhero franchise movie, or HBO makes enough money with their huge base of cable subscriptions, and so you don't feel bad about pirating Superhero 4 or Game of Thrones well sure, I understand that - none of the producers are in any danger of losing their shirts, everyone on the cast and crew got paid handsomely at the fairly generous rates their guilds/unions have negotiated over the years, and the shareholders still make plenty of money and get a nice dividend check every quarter. On the other hand, lots of smaller content providers are getting fucked financially because it's a lot harder to answer the question of 'how will investors make their money back?' than it was a few years ago. So spare me the stereotypes of evil media barons trying to stop the brave plucky technological underdogs. That same technology is also massively disruptive to creative professionals and small businesses that work outside the Big Media tent, and actively hinders their ability to make a living.
• chx 12y ago
  "Piracy is a service problem." -- remember that? There's nothing on Netflix you can't download illegally. People would pick Netflix still because it's a superior experience to what most people perceive as shady sites. This has always been so with DRM: the only ones it inconveniences are the paying customers. Incredible stupidity.
  • anigbrowl 12y ago
    I use Netflix every day. The DRM doesn't inconvenience me at all. I'm sure someone will be along in a minute to tell me they have to go down a salt mine and they won't have any internet down there and it's such a tragedy that they won't be able to finish watching the thing they started watching on Netflix because stupid DRM. Sorry, but those are bullshit first world problems. Your life is not significantly impacted by this.
    • jhasse 12y ago
      My wireless network is very slow in my bedroom. Also there's often no internet connection on most railway lines in Germany. So we aren't just talking about going down a salt mine.
      • anigbrowl 12y ago
        Like I said, first world problems. You can upgrade or move your wi-fi router. The idea of internet on a train was practically unheard of a decade ago. I'm sorry, but I don't think that being able to watch a movie is so important in every situation that DRM is intolerable, even though I'm a filmmaker.
        • Xylakant 12y ago
          It's certainly not intolerable to not watch movies on the train, but it's inconvenient. I spend a significant chunk of my time on trains every week where I can watch movies. And due to DRM the illegal product is superior. Guess what people are doing? I've never seen anyone watching Netflix, but I see VLC on a daily basis. It's a service problem.
• copsarebastards 12y ago
  > I hear what the proponents of non-DRM browsers are saying, but for media streaming companies content is their bread and butter. I am not sure what the alternatives are. The alternative is non-DRM browsers. EME does nothing to protect content, so the "content is their bread and butter" argument doesn't work. > Content providers will stick with technologies like Flash because HTML5 alone could not provide EME. Or, they'd give up on EME because all the major platforms were hostile to it and it provides them no defensible value. > Lack of such feature set HTML5 backwards because huge content providers would shy away from using web as the dominant platform of media delivery. Including EME sets the web platform back because we no longer have control of that part of our browsers.
  • eridius 12y ago
    > Or, they'd give up on EME because all the major platforms were hostile to it and it provides them no defensible value. That's absurd. Netflix would sooner stop supporting web browsers on desktop OS's before they started allowing DRM-free streaming. Regardless of your own view on DRM, Netflix's licenses to the content they provide almost certainly requires the use of DRM, and the companies that own the content would never be willing to relicense them for DRM-free streaming. Without EME, Netflix would be relying on proprietary browser plugins forever, and if a platform with a significant userbase appeared that didn't support any form of proprietary plugin, and they wanted to support that platform, they'd develop their own proprietary application for it instead of providing DRM-free streaming (think of how Netflix has applications for mobile OS's and even consoles, both living room consoles and handheld consoles).
    • timonovici 12y ago
      > the companies that own the content would never be willing to relicense them for DRM-free streaming. Don't be so sure. People were saying exactly this several years ago about music. We owe it to Jobs that he realized it's stupid idea, and put an end to it. > they'd develop their own proprietary application for it instead of providing DRM-free streaming (think of how Netflix has applications for mobile OS's and even consoles, both living room consoles and handheld consoles). That seems better to me, than poisoning a whole standard just to get their way, or the highway.
• davexunit 12y ago
  >I am not sure what the alternatives are. Refuse to use Netflix and co.! >Lack of such feature set HTML5 backwards No, giving in on DRM set it backwards. The web is intended to be "free and open", which means that DRM is not welcome.