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Netflix Downloads

media.netflix.com

256 pointsLukeB_UK119 comments

While this is great and very usable, especially for people with limited data plans, I can't help but feel disappointed that simple offline caching of content is still considered a major feature in 2016. Without DRM, this would be a no-brainer.

A no-brainer except for the $10/month streaming part.

A streaming service is perfectly viable without DRM, especially if downloading is speed limited after a while. If you want to make copies at playback speed, well, you could do that with DRM too and it hasn't made the system collapse.

Without DRM, it's super viable because P2P is a piece of cake, and Netflix would only have to seed and host less-frequently-used content.

I don't think DRM stops them from doing P2P. Limited upload speeds are a much bigger issue. Plus people finding it icky to be an uploader on something they already paid for.

BitTorrent solved the limited upload speed problem. Split the data into chunks and download from multiple users at once. Even that is only necessary if a user doesn't have enough upload bandwidth for a stream, which for 1080p is ~5Mbps.

And the second problem has a simple solution. Give the customer a tiny discount for uploading. Anyone with an unmetered connection sees it as free money even if it's only pennies/month, and it works fine even if some customers turn it off because the discount-accepting customers can upload more than they download.

Which DRM free streaming service has the most customers?

(let's say they have to be at least sort of like Netflix, with minimal advertising and comedy/drama shows)

None, because currently it's not possible to get non-DRMed content from provider for various reasons - legal and dumb ones.

Does it need to be legal? $10/mo for usenet and it just gives you what you want, DRM free, often in better quality than other services offer too.

I used to be able to use Netflix alone fairly well, but the fracturing of online services is making me lean more and more on automated piracy tools like Sonarr. If I were going to pay $10/mo to a dozen services I'd go back to cable.

I'm not sure what that's supposed to prove. There are only a few big studios, and they all happen to be wrapped up in inertia and paranoia. But that's just how the dice came out, it's not because DRM provides actual value. If they wanted to perform a realistic market assessment we could be DRM-free in a snap.

The point is that 'viable' means something. Overcoming inertia and paranoia is providing actual value.

The business model is viable in terms of the studios deciding to sanction it. So not treating the studios as black boxes.

Who would license content to a company without any DRM protection?

Your question implies that there's any practical use for that DRM in streaming services. There's not and it does nothing useful but annoy users.

Anyone with ounce of motivation can easily bypass and extract the media content, so the only thing DRM does is piss of paying users which can't watch content on flaky connections, flights, travel and alternative operating systems.

Meanwhile on torrent sites you find Netflix digital dumps in matter of minutes after release.

Not true.

An important use for DRM in regards to streaming services is to prevent people on shared networks from getting access to the data. For instance, if I was in a college dorm with dorm-wide wifi, and I was watching my de-DRM'd Netflix, anyone on the dorm intranet could snoop my packets and get the data being transmitted to me by Netflix, for free.

That is nigh on impossible to do when the content is encrypted with DRM.

To be fair, simple end-to-end encryption of non-DRM'd material would accomplish the same.

Never in my times of working for content provider / transport was that even remotely the reason for DRM.

It was always passing the legal buck ("It wasn't us that let those evil evil pirates steal your series, we did all we could, look at that DRM software certificate!").

Snooping packets in dorm rooms? No.

Not to mention that even if it were an issue, TLS would be a much easier and cheaper solution.

What? You're just talking about TLS. This has absolutely nothing to do with client-side DRM modules.

TLS solves that problem.

DRM also provides more legal protections to the content providers when someone breaks it.

Anyone with ounce of motivation can easily bypass and extract the media content

This is obviously untrue. For at least 95% of Netflix users this is inconceivably difficult. Peek out your bubble and you may also notice that torrent use is massively declining in popularity because they're a horrible user experience.

> you may also notice that torrent use is massively declining in popularity because they're a horrible user experience.

The people that use Popcorn Time/etc would disagree. That has been a fantastic experience, so it's natural that the MPAA would go after it tooth & nail.

I appreciate the legal reasons for DRM. My point was just that it keeps being an obstacle for technical innovation, however simple, which is depressing.

Aren't most music services DRM free these days? iTunes, Amazon, Pandora...

Looks like it's only available for smartphones and tablets, not for computers. Probably because on smartphones and tables they have their own app and don't have to rely on a browser.

Too bad they couldn't make it a chrome extension or something at least

Can someone please explain why this comment is being downvoted? Is it not feasible or is that stupid in some way? I'd just like to know if the downvotes are from a technical perspective.

DRM relies on handing the ciphertext, a decryption program, and the key to the opponent, and then telling them not to use it except when they are allowed to use it.

If your browser is in charge of running the storage of the ciphertext and the decryption, it is much easier to debug it and apply a patch that will store the plaintext than if you have to do this all in an Android emulator as well.

But either way: DRM doesn't work for long.

In the meantime, Netflix is providing enough value for me that I happily pay their monthly fee and don't bother looking for ways to break their DRM.

As they say 'convenient is better than better' and I've long looked for a company like Netflix who will allow me to give them money and they will let me watch what I want.

I think that's what Netflix wants to be, getting the content creators to agree is the tough part, I imagine. Another benefit to their producing their own material.

> Probably because on smartphones and tables they have their own app and don't have to rely on a browser.

But then they have to rely on the OS instead. Not sure what is better.

what if you get your computer browser's developer mode to masquerade as a tablet/phone?

It only works in their apps, not in mobile browsers. So that wouldn't help you.

http://www.bluestacks.com/

Would be interesting to know if this works, but if the use case is watching films on laptop on plane, rather than tablet on plane, I hope you have a power source.

Does anyone know if e.g. Google's Widevine or Apple's FairPlay support the concept of applying DRM to downloaded files?

If they do, they should be able to get this to the web version of Netflix.

(Laptop screens are great for watching video content on e.g. a flight or train ride. Bringing an extra piece of hardware like a tablet just for this purpose seems silly. Phone screens offer poor ergonomy. They are only really a decent compromise on a bus or a subway, or similar.)

Of course they do. That's how an iPod could play FairPlay content without a network connection. They didn't strip the DRM upon upload the the iPod.

I'm sure the Netflix files on your iPad are still DRMed. They just give you some kind of key that's only good for a limited amount of time.

I guess the practical question here is whether that functionality is usable via the javascript API:s.

I'd expect it is if the browser implements the security plugin infrastructure that Netflix (and others) have been pushing.

Up until very recently Netflix has been saying that offline viewing is not something they want.

Maybe they were just doing a Steve, though.

They have a Windows 10 app, though.

Unfortunately, you need to use the Windows Store to get it.

edit: Actually, I just checked an apparently you can download the free apps from the store without logging in now. I tried to do this a very long time ago and skipped because it wanted a Microsoft account login, so I left. I'm glad they've changed this.

Works on Chromebook.

https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7021273?hl=en

I reeeeeeally wish I could watch my shows in a more legitimate way than currently. I recently went through everything that I'm watching and tried to find out what I could actually watch on streaming services.

.....which was unfortunately only a limited subset, especially since I'm not US based (Scandinavia here).

Besides the problem of everything being spread out over Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime and what have you not, some content is just not available, such as Supernatural outside of US/UK/Germany.

I almost feel like the TV networks wants people to pirate things...

I think the TV networks were very short sighted and ended up with shitty contracts that never accounted for distributing or streaming their content internationally.

They would if they could, but they'd have to go back and renegotiate all those old settled contracts.

Still happens today. Example being Amazons Grand Tour not being available in Canada from launch. Of all companies they should have had that figured out.

Netflix is well aware of their massive quantity differences country-to-country, hence the push to focus almost entirely on building their own originals to create a unified library w/o having to negotiate for streaming rights in each country.

The differences are pretty nuts:

http://exstreamist.com/is-your-countrys-netflix-library-grow...

What kind of DRM would they use to store local copies?

EDIT: On Android 7.1 VLC for Android, was able to "open" (duration etc) a large file I found in Netflix directory (.hidden), though not decode sound or video. There were two smaller files besides I suspect are audio tracks. And several other very small files, subtitles maybe.

They probably aren't storing the videos as you are traditionally thinking about them - you don't get to download a video file which you can play anywhere.

Most likely what they've done is stored the video chunks locally and then the Netflix app is "streaming" these chunks from the local storage rather than the netflix servers. If you looked through the folder that holds these chunks, you'd probably just see a bunch of randomly named 100mb files. That's all the DRM they need, you have no ability to consume these files without the Netflix app.

That is not "all the DRM they need". Files split up into "randomly named 100mb chunks" does not make them safe from would-be pirates with a penchant for reverse engineering.

I mean, there's probably more to it than "randomly named 100mb chunks", but for the sake of brevity, that's how I described it.

The chunks themselves would have the same DRM applied as when you'd stream from their servers. In the latter case you can also just sniff the traffic, but that's not enough to be able to decrypt the video.

DRM never did stop "would-be pirates with penchant for reverse engineering". Ever.

Plus, the owner of the Android/iOS device is paying for that content anyway, why would it be in any way a problem if he can open that downloaded file in another software?!?!

Technically paying for a license to play said content in the Netflix app.

I agree that DRM is a waste of time and the pirates are going to get the content whatever happens, but a $10/m streaming service is only licensing you to watch video in a few specific scenarios. If you had spent $3 an episode (or whatever it is on iTunes/Google Play these days) to own it, then I'd expect a DRM free file to be available (Though I doubt you actually get one in reality).

For anyone who missed it, it seems like you can only download and view offline copies of videos in the Netflix app for Android and iOS¹. (Whatever the form of the DRM is that they’re using, it’s a definite that the Netflix app decodes it when you do playback).

――――――

¹ — https://help.netflix.com/en/node/54816

>That's all the DRM they need, you have no ability to consume these files without the Netflix app.

This is like saying that .doc files are as good as DRM'd, since who's going to open one in anything but Word?

I get what you're saying but it's a security through obscurity argument - if this takes off, of course someone can figure out the encoding and transcode straight from those files.

It's just the same security they use for streaming. If you can decode the chunks, you can also capture the streamed data and decode it.

I would imagine downloads can be faster than 1x realtime, no? Having to stream things is a serious limit on ripping (transcoding) speed.

Whut?

You can write a stream to file with maybe 2 commands, and try to decode it later.

If the DRM on the stream is broken, you can save the stream to file and decode it later. If the DRM on the stream is safe, then it should be equally safe between the stream and saving the file to disk.

I fail to see how letting you save encrypted stuff to local disc has anything to do with breaking the DRM.

Also, the first thought people have when given a new service for free is "how can I use this to pirate movies". This is why we can't have nice stuff.....

My comment has nothing to do with DRM. I'm saying, "if there is no DRM" (or it is broken or can be broken), then the difference between downloading and streaming might be the difference between taking 2.2 days to "stream to disk" Game of Thrones (60 episodes @ 55 minutes) -- or, say, downloading it in 4 hours. (If downloads are allowed to be faster than realtime, which would only make sense.) GoT is obviously a hypothetical example.

If you don't think that makes quite a real difference in enabling or incentivizing actual piracy then I think I'll just disagree - that rate limit is a huge difference in my book and makes it far more likely for someone to take the trouble to rip and transcode.

You imply that there's speed throttling when streaming. There's not and it makes no difference if you're connecting to a streaming endpoint or just getting a downloaded file.

(Which you can confirm by fast availability of streamed content on torrent sites or if you actually test the streams.)

Thanks. Are you saying you could "stream" a 50 minute episode in 3 minutes even before this announcement?

Your second statement (about torrent sites) implies that everyone was already "downloading" content and NetFlix's servers were happy to serve the streams as a single very fast download without regard to how long it should takes clients to consume that (i.e. no throttling) - is this correct?

Yeah, at the end of the day, the player is also downloading and caching chunks. Usually faster than playback as well - precaching ahead so line fluctuations don't make your video stutter.

A file on a disk is still just a stream of video. Even if they use a proprietary container format, without DRM it's still very possible to reassemble the file into a more common container.

I know that's what some music streaming services used to do.

But I still see some risk for Netflix there... Split files are made to be whole again.

If you had only one movie stored locally, you would very quickly be able to solve the puzzle.

On the Kindle Fire we had a "secure enclave" bit of hardware so the files were encrypted with a key that was hard/impossible for users to get. I don't think regular android has anything like that, but they might use Widevine or something similar

Most Android implementations these days use something based on the ARM SecureCore to manage keys for things like device encryption.

How much are Android apps able to hide things in the filesystem? It drives me crazy sometimes not being able to figure out where Amazon Music puts my downloaded music files; there's an `amazonmp3` folder, but all it has in it is `.prefs.bak`.

I saw Netflix's chief product officer Neil Hunt say a while ago Netflix would "never" offer downloads, but I have to say I'm really pleased with this. Getting the train through spotty service areas effectively rendered Netflix unusable, but now! :)

Anybody in such a position that says "never" to anything is either naive or they're protecting their current short-term interests. I'm willing to bet most of them say that for short-term reasons while internally they'll still consider it in the future; there was once a time that HBO would "never" offer a monthly streaming service and here we are today.

Neil Hunt a year ago [http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2015/09/the-real-reason-netflix-won...]

“I think it's something that lots of people ask for. We'll see if it's something lots of people will use. Undoubtedly it adds considerable complexity to your life with Amazon Prime – you have to remember that you want to download this thing. It's not going to be instant, you have to have the right storage on your device, you have to manage it, and I'm just not sure people are actually that compelled to do that, and that it's worth providing that level of complexity.”

Part of me wonders how much this was marketing spin to cover a gap they had relative to Amazon Prime and they were in actuality evaluating how to catch up.

This happens far to often. Notorious example is Ballmer saying iPhone will be a flop when teams internally know that Windows Mobile just blew up.

He wasn't wrong, it does add serious interface complexity.

But we all know that it's a very desirable feature and most people are willing to pay for that complexity to be able to watch offline.

So it was mostly spin, like Steve Jobs saying they'd never make a tablet at a point where it had to be in final development internally.

> He wasn't wrong, it does add serious interface complexity.

How? I don't have Netflix, but, for Amazon Video, you get a download button—that seems to be the only bit of the interface that reflects the ability to download at all. After that, you don't have to worry about whether you're watching a local or streamed copy; the movie plays just the same.

It was "click on anything and it plays".

Now it's "click on anything and it plays. Unless your offline. Where search also doesn't work. And when you're offline you probably go somewhere else to see what you're looking for. When online we need to show that too. And buttons to let you download or see the download status. And....

I'm not saying it's insurmountable, but it's quite a bit more than the old "everything you see you can watch now and that's all there is to it" model.

> It was "click on anything and it plays".

> Now it's "click on anything and it plays. Unless your offline. Where search also doesn't work. And when you're offline you probably go somewhere else to see what you're looking for. When online we need to show that too. And buttons to let you download or see the download status. And....

But it seems that your 'before' is not quite right: if you can't download videos, then it's "click on anything and it plays, unless you're offline", full stop! That is, by allowing download of videos, a total-failure mode has been replaced by a mode with different functionality. Although it's technically true that "you can do some things" is more complicated than "you can't do anything", I'm not sure that it's really worse.

No, because if you were off-line the app wouldn't let you in. The app set that condition clearly and enforced it. So there was no confusion, 'cause if you could see it you could play it.

PlayOn is on sale for $50 right now: https://www.playon.tv/playlater

Browse/download any streaming service (that you have access to) easily - I love it.

Isn't BitTorrent still free?

Trackers aren't doing so hot right now :(

My ISP wants to charge me for it now. $5,000 they said.

Isn't piracy still illegal?

The concern I have with giving them money is: They're going to get shut down, sooner if not later. Big media have had people raided for less than what they're doing, and laws are written (again, by big media) to put them into a legally gray area.

Morally I don't think what they're doing is wrong. But the US government is in bed with media goliaths, and the two work together to shut down re-hosted content (even in areas where re-hosting MIGHT be fair usage).

Playon doesn't rehost the content. It runs on your computer and automates the process of capturing the video stream from a website. So, you have to _actually wait for the entire video to play_ to have it fully downloaded because its nothing more than a screencapture in essence.

The whole thing is a little flaky, but I'm really pleased with what it cost me ($60 if I remember).

Seems like only a limited selection is available offline.

From the article: "For example, Orange is The New Black, Narcos and The Crown are available for download today."

It's probably due to licensing. These are all Netflix originals where as movies or partnerships would probably charge a fee for offline content. I'd imagine offline would be considered "rentals" so it would be treated similarly to Amazon Video or iTunes.

There are some non-original content movies and such too.

This has been the differentiator between Netflix and Amazon Prime - very welcome news indeed. I do wonder how limited the number of allowed downloads will be, though...

It's probably not a coincidence that this is coming out at the same time as AT&T is zero-rating their own streaming service.

Looks like it's only going to be on Netflix originals at the moment. But at least it's a step in the right direction! Wonder how long you can keep the content for after download?

Your account seems to be marked as [dead] btw. I have vouched for you, as I can't see any real reason for this.

Congratulations on being alive again?

Polygon said there are some non-Netflix movies that are available for download.

I too am very curious what the download policy is. I think you only get a few days on Amazon or stuff you copy off your TiVo so I wonder how much time Netflix gives you.

Oddly not everything is downloadable though. No Luke Cage here on Netflix Hong Kong (which is odd given it's Netflix made).

I would imagine agreements regarding distribution rights. Netflix (distributor) can only offline stuff they have the rights to.

HK in particular I would assume Netflix (content producer) are interested in partnering with a Chinese company as that region tends to favour those quite heavily.

They said it wasn't going to be available for every title yet.

Not every Netflix Original is available in every region. This can be either because Netflix was producing the show before they were in that region, and so signed over the rights to the show in that region to a different provider, or because they have agreements with other producers that need to be on board as well. The same idiosyncrasies will probably apply to downloads.

For instance, in the case of Luke Cage, maybe Marvel needs to sign off on delivery changes like this? Hard to determine without looking at Netflix's actual contracts.

A lot of the Netflix "Orginals" are really just Netflix being the exclusive distributor in a particular region of a show produced by someone else.

I literally just typed "netflix offline mode" in Google, because of an upcoming long flight next week. This couldn't have come at a better time. Even if this is just limited to Netflix originals, I'm fine with that. Their original content is better than their studio catalog at this point.

I am on a tablet on Android 4.4.4, with the latest Netflix version downloaded 4.12.0 (code 13287), trying to download Narcos, and don't see the download icon as shown on Netflix's instructions[0]. Anyone else not seeing it?

[0]: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/54816

Fantastic, this has been a welcome feature on Amazon Prime and even moreso on Netflix where the selection is currently more to my liking.

Nice! I'll travel with a bunch of kids to a place without internet. We would like to watch a movie at night in a projector connected to a laptop.

It looks like it won't be possible to stream the contents of the netflix app in my phone to the projector.

depending on which kinda of phone you have you can have your smartphone screen shared via HDMI to your projector:

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-MHL-HDMI-Adapter-Packaging/dp...

It's a nice Nexflix addition. When's Pandora/Spotify is going to do this? It only makes sense.

The real fix is to have reasonably priced unlimited 4G/5G data. But it doesn't seem to be coming.

You can do that with Spotify if you are a Premium user.

Is this the precursor to making Netflix a hybrid/P2P service, too?

Huh? Just updated the app, doesnt work - no downloads ready. Not even the Netflix shows they promote in the blogpost. Im on android 5.1.1. Hopefully theyll get it together, nice feature.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's a limitation of your "old" Android version. Not saying that's definitely the case, but wouldn't be surprised.

Looks like they support 4.4.2 and higher https://help.netflix.com/en/node/54816

Delayed rollout probably.

Any confirmation of what resolution? Preloading 4k HDR might make a more consistent experience than random downsampling mid-scene.

I have a new theory about user requirements. Spotify and Netflix has same feature now. Only one difference exists music vs. video. What will be the spotify and netflix of VR content? It will be downloadable to our mobile phones. to be continued...

Good!

Now fix subtitles and expand the catalog...

I've never had an issue with Netflix subtitles, what exactly is your problem with them?

And yeah, it would be swell if Netflix could snap their fingers and expand their catalog, but they can't.

Some subtitles just fail to load or appear on an android device.

Also sometimes the last character is trimmed.

Fuck DRM. Seriously.

Apple will be happy more people will pay for the extortionate large iPhones.

How could you possibly be correlating Netflix supporting downloads and phone screen size preferences?

I think he means large storage space, not physically large devices.

Yeah I was meaning storage, but larger screen size phones might see a boost in sales too.

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