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Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

techblog.netflix.com

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Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#331

Post by tptacek »

BuuQu9hu wrote: post #298
tptacek wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not my argument, as you can see from my comment above. What you've done here is twist my argument around to introduce claims I didn't make that you find easy to rebut.

> by standardizing everything but (in essence) the authenticated key derivation step Is there another interpretation of 'everything' in this context? You're making EME far more comprehensive than it is. CDMs do way more than derive a key, so your statement is false on its face.

What is it you're saying CDMs do? Maybe we're just talking past each other.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#332

Post by scarface74 »

matt4077 wrote: post #251
dasil003 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but as someone who spent nearly a decade founding and building a premium content VOD service, and 6 of those years fighting fiercely against DRM and making great content available without DRM, I have both the knowledge and moral authority to say that you're living in a fantasy world. You might as well say that anyone who is not living an RMS-sanctioned ascetic technology lifestyle is hurting the cause of free…

Browser makers have plenty leverage. A Firefox user watching Netflix will, and this is a tautology, be worse off if they cannot continue doing so. That may lead to people switching to other browsers more often than dropping Netflix subscriptions, but the costs for Netflix wouldn't be 0, and may even be substantial considering the population of people using Firefox is self-selected to those placing a high value on ope…

Well. Look what happened when Apple refused to support Flash. Did Netflix all the sudden support HTML 5 H.264 video in the browser in a cross platform way? No. They wrote a proprietary app for iOS. Would more people have been served if Netflix could have had a standard that worked across all browsers that would have allowed Android users to use Netflix 9 months sooner?

Firefox users were already viewing Netflix with a Silverlight plug in. Would you rather be stuck with an MS solution or one with input from various companies.

As far as the music industry getting rid of DRM it had nothing to do with "carrot vs. sticks." The real history:

2003: itunes was introduced with DRMd music that only worked with the iPod.

late 2006: other companies tried to sell drmd music but since it didn't work with the iPod, none of them could gain traction.

Early 2007: the music industry asked Apple to license FairPlay. Apple refused. As an alternative, Jobs said that if the music industry would license their music without DRM, any music sold anywhere would be compatible with any player. His "Thoughts on Music" essay giving this alternative was widely publicized in 2007 (https://www.google.com/amp/readwrite.com/2007/02/06/steve_jo...) and was on the front page of Apple.com

The music industry wanted variable priced music, the ability to bundle songs, a cut of every iPod sold, and a deposit to insure against losses due to privacy. Apple refused all of those conditions.

To both decrease Apple's dominance in the market and to increase the competition, the music industry allowed all of Apple's competitors who would bow to their demands to offer DRM free music. Apple was only able to sell DRM free music by EMI and independent labels and they weren't allowed to sell music at all over cellular for the then new iPhone.

2008: Apple and the music industry came to terms and Apple started selling DRM free music.

The only reason the music industry allowed DRM free music was to decrease Apple's dominance.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#333

Post by scarface74 »

veeti wrote: post #194
apostacy wrote: post #127

This is the strategy Microsoft tried over a decade ago with ActiveX. And Firefox saved us. It was starting to be normalized, to have to install ActiveX controls to view certain content. Companies like CinemaNow[1] offered Netflix-like streaming movie services using Microsoft's ActiveX based Janus DRM over a decade ago. Thankfully, the community had more of a backbone back then. Firefox and Linux were not broken becau…

> It's only a matter of time until Firefox is just a wrapper for webkit This tired "Firefox is just turning into Chrome because Australis/DRM/web extensions/xkcd 1172" hyperbole simply couldn't be further from the truth. Mozilla is building an entirely new rendering engine with Servo [1], parts of which will be shipping in Firefox this year [2]. [1] https://servo.org/ [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum

Yeah Mozilla building a new rendering engine to compete worked out so well before....

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#334

Post by kelnos »

CaptSpify wrote: post #310
tptacek wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and Apple have very little leverage. If even one major studio withdrew all their content from Apple and only made it available on Netflix, Apple could potentially lose millions of subscribers. People want to watch what they want to watch.

> People want to watch what they want to watch. You keep using this phrase. Doesn't that also suggest that, if given enough trouble, they will just pirate that content instead? DRM has shown to do very little to stop that, so why continue pretending that it does.

> You keep using this phrase. Doesn't that also suggest that, if given enough trouble, they will just pirate that content instead? DRM has shown to do very little to stop that, so why continue pretending that it does.

Yes, but, in general, trouble has been decreasing, and so has the need to pirate. I would argue that there are only three kinds of people who pirate anymore:

1. People who want a local copy of the content that can't be taken away (e.g. Netflix pulling a title, or just canceling one's Netflix account).

2. Content that is so long-tail that it's not available for streaming from one of the major players that have decent device/playback support.

3. People who are so far in the "openness"/ownership camp that they would refuse to buy into a service like Netflix unless they provided #1 (DRM-free, of course).

The fourth kind of person is mostly gone: the person who doesn't need 1-3, but finds the options for playing content legally to be too cumbersome, or who can't find a legal player for their chosen viewing device. (Essentially, they've been "given enough trouble".)

If Netflix were to drop all browser support, and release native apps for Windows and macOS, there would be an increase of that fourth kind of person (Linux users, mainly, though I wouldn't put it past Netflix to release a Linux client too), but that wouldn't change the situation for the 1-3 type people, who are the bulk of pirating community.

I really think, for the vast majority of viewers, having a native Windows/MacOS app, plus native apps for Android/iOS, is plenty. Taking away browser support isn't going to increase piracy by any measurable amount.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#335

Post by Silhouette »

mastazi wrote: post #283
e40 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with "people want to watch what they want to watch." I have quite a few data points that say you are flat wrong about that. I would add to this: people watch what they want to watch and how they want to watch it. I've literally downloaded HBO shows even though I'm an HBO Now subscriber. The Roku HBO Now app is so horrible, I just hate using it.

> I have quite a few data points Show us the data points or it didn't happen. I am highly sceptical about your statement and am convinced that most people are willing to pay in exchange for ease of use and convenience.

Show us the data points or it didn't happen.

Sorry, that's not how it works. The situation is what it is, and the people with hard data are going to act on it, and your scepticism does not change any of that.

As another person with business interests that produce custom video content for niche markets, I have shifted significantly in my attitude towards DRM since discovering how real people behave. We tried to be nice and considerate and not limit access to the video files with DRM. We did this while producing new, original content unlike anything else out there for our subscribers. We held out for several years.

But we got to the point where we were spending so much time dealing with that that it was directly affecting our ability to deliver for the vast majority of our customers who respected the rules. We were losing out on revenues, our genuine customers were losing out on new content, and the only people winning were the freeloaders and the people enjoying our content on other people's sites/channels/whatever.

My concern about DRM affecting legitimate customers if something goes wrong is as strong as ever, so we still take a cautious approach and err on the side of being nice. However, I have no qualms at all about DRMing every single asset we have, and I have no qualms whatsoever about deploying the lawyers against people who knowingly, maliciously and without remorse rip off the results of several years of hard work and share them with others.

As a final point, none of this negates your point that making access convenient and prices reasonable improves conversion rates. But I see little evidence that this helps if part of your potential market is finding your content totally free from someone else first.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#336

Post by derekp7 »

amelius wrote: post #290
dasil003 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but as someone who spent nearly a decade founding and building a premium content VOD service, and 6 of those years fighting fiercely against DRM and making great content available without DRM, I have both the knowledge and moral authority to say that you're living in a fantasy world. You might as well say that anyone who is not living an RMS-sanctioned ascetic technology lifestyle is hurting the cause of free…

People have been recording the things they watch since the invention of the VCR. DRM will not have any impact on that. Someone will come along, and make a video-grabbing utility that bypasses the DRM. Also, many of the content is already available via bittorrent. DRM is pointless. But perhaps you are right about "browser vendors refusing to cooperate" not being the best possible approach. However, do you know what is…

We somehow got away from DRM on audio. I was wondering how to do this for video too. What worked for audio, was that you had one vendor (Apple) that had a large enough market share. In order to sell DRMd media that worked on Ipods, the media companies had to sell through Apple. Or they could sell non-DRMd files that would still work on Ipods. They did the calculation, and figured they would make more money going non-DRM so they can pick other distributors such as Amazon.

For video, people don't download it and take it with them (typically), they either play from their computer or from a set top box or smart TV. So there is no market forces that would give the movie studios any incentive to do non-DRM.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#337

Post by EpicEng »

criley2 wrote: post #187
dkonofalski wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I'm just looking too far into your comment, but I don't see why you're blaming Netflix (or it seems you are) or how you got to them being the bad guys for this? They're not the ones that make the content. If it was up to Netflix, they would just release their shows DRM-free on Netflix for any platform. Unfortunately, that's not how things work and they have to bow to the demands of the content distrib…

"I don't know if I'm just looking too far into your comment, but I don't see why you're blaming Netflix (or it seems you are) or how you got to them being the bad guys for this? They're not the ones that make the content. If it was up to Netflix, they would just release their shows DRM-free on Netflix for any platform. Unfortunately, that's not how things work and they have to bow to the demands of the content distri…

Netflix absolutely does not have a responsibility to go out of business for the sake of pushing an issue few people care about. They have no real leverage here.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#338

Post by flukus »

bubblethink wrote: post #260
ReverseCold wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone can fork FF though and make it so that the DRM looks like it's there to the websites it visits, but it isn't really there. There's no way DRM can't be removed if I own the device that can play it.

You don't understand how this works. Firefox just provides some APIs that the DRM blob can use. All the decryption is done by the blob, not Firefox. You can reverse engineer the blob itself to an extent, but that will also become impossible with SGX (hence 4k on kabylake + edge only).

Can't you just run in an emulator to get the blob? It looks like qemu was the first to support SGX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Guard_Extensions

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#339

Post by Silhouette »

amelius wrote: post #325
grinich wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying door locks are pointless because you can break a window and climb through. Protecting media copyright isn't a black or white thing like crypto. It's about compromises to drive behavior and consumer spending with convenience.

What exactly do you think this DRM will stop? 1. People who have access to the content can usually see it over and over again (when they have a subscription to a service like Netflix). DRM will do nothing here. 2. People who don't have access to the content can't even see the DRM'ed version of the file, so DRM will do nothing here either. 3. People who want to pirate (illegally distribute) the content have advanced t…

1. People who have access to the content can usually see it over and over again (when they have a subscription to a service like Netflix). DRM will do nothing here.

Sure it will. It will stop people writing a script to download as much as they can get away with in a single month and then cancelling since they have enough content to keep them going for several more months without paying for them.

3. People who want to pirate (illegally distribute) the content have advanced tools and knowledge to circumvent DRM, so DRM is of no use here again.

That is a big assumption, and in many cases not a correct one. The major online DRM systems today are fairly robust, and if anyone has a crack for some of them, they're keeping their cards very close to their chests. The leaks of major movies that you find on torrent sites and the like are usually from other sources.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#340

Post by Rusky »

bubblethink wrote: post #260
ReverseCold wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone can fork FF though and make it so that the DRM looks like it's there to the websites it visits, but it isn't really there. There's no way DRM can't be removed if I own the device that can play it.

You don't understand how this works. Firefox just provides some APIs that the DRM blob can use. All the decryption is done by the blob, not Firefox. You can reverse engineer the blob itself to an extent, but that will also become impossible with SGX (hence 4k on kabylake + edge only).

What's to stop someone reverse engineering the blob before it's loaded into an SGX enclave? I don't understand it very well so I could be missing something, but wouldn't that at least let someone document how the DRM works even if not running their own implementation?
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