The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all? It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long enough to make impact on initial sales. Pirated Netflix shows appear on the torrents same day, and unless they have full-stack protection from the decoder to the screen, not much can be done. They seem to make user experience worse for nothing.
> The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all? Well that investment is pretty low since Widevine is quite easy to integrate and the licensing cost is 0 for Netflix. The thing is, you do need some Digital Rights Management somewhere. If you just have clear-text mp4 with no auth, you can just share that mp4 url, and you could watch movies directly off Netfli…
You seem to think not having this specific DRM mandates a particular transport and authentication scheme? These are not at all related.
Really it sounds like what is being requested is that there not be non-portable binary blobs. That's it.