HD Monitor Causes DRM Issues with Netflix

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday January 3, 2008 @12:10PM from the new-years-low-resolution dept.

Jeremiah Cornelius points us to Davis Freeberg's blog, where he discusses his "nightmare scenario" of losing access to his DRM-protected purchases by upgrading his PC monitor. "When I called them they confirmed my worst fears. In order to access the Watch Now service, I had to give Microsoft's DRM sniffing program access to all of the files on my hard drive. If the software found any non-Netflix video files, it would revoke my rights to the content and invalidate the DRM. This means that I would lose all the movies that I've purchased from Amazon's Unbox, just to troubleshoot the issue. Because my computer allows me to send an unrestricted HDTV feed to my monitor, Hollywood has decided to revoke my ability to stream 480 resolution video files from Netflix. In order to fix my problem, Netflix recommended that I downgrade to a lower res VGA setup."

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Re:Sorry Server Down - Link To Article by jibjibjib · 2008-01-03 19:39 · Score: 1, Redundant

Other than making for a good story, losing movies from Amazon Unbox is not really a problem. You can re-download videos you've purchased from Unbox as many times as you want, unlike with iTMS. If your key no longer works, download them again.
Just because you may have an awesome internet connection on which you can download however much crap you want whenever you want without caring whether you have it already or not, doesn't mean everyone else does too. I, for one, would not consider having to re-download a few GB of video that is already on my hard drive to be "not really a problem".