Netflix Wants To Go HTML5, But Not Without DRM

FuzzNugget writes "In a recent blog post, Netflix details their plans to transition from Silverlight to HTML5, but with one caveat: HTML5 needs to include a built-in DRM scheme. With the W3C's proposed Encrypted Media Extensions, this may come to fruition. But what would we sacrificing in openness and the web as we know it? How will developers of open source browsers like Firefox respond to this?"

Comments

not much better

[ssam]

The only way DRM can work if if you make the decrypted video uncaptureable. So on any system where the root user can read the frame buffer there is no point. HTML5 DRM will only work on systems that have DRM build in to the OS, which is pretty much the same systems that have silverlight.

The only way i can see it ever getting to linux is if the encrypted stream can be passed to rights managed hardware on a GPU. but then if i have a GPU that can effectively play the encrypted stream, why would i ever worry about decrypting it in the first place, i could dump the network stream to disk, and play back through GPU whenever I wanted.

Re:Silverlight greatness

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

This means Silverlight will dynamically adjust the video and audio bitrate so that even users on less-than-fast lines can stream Silverlight video content.

I doubt that Silverlight is anything special in that regard. I would be stunned to learn that it used anything other than a standard codec like vc1 and just switches between a couple of different bit-rate streams that were pre-encoded.

This being said, the DRM probably isn't as needed by the Netflix itself but the content providers.

Nope. Netflix lurves DRM. They will force it on viewers even when the producer does not want it. Hell, they won't even let the producer put up a message at the start of the movie to tell viewers they can get a DRM-free copy.