Hacker News Reader

Comment by trun | Hacker News Reader

This will be an interesting one to watch. I have a hard time believing that any of the movie studios would be willing to let Netflix stream their content DRM free and at the moment HTML5 video doesn't support DRM...

View on HN

That was my first thought as well. They never even said anything about video - the article acts like its obvious they mean video, but it really doesn't sound like it. If they're hiring devopers with HTML5 interface experience, that's probably what they mean. I can't see hiring new devs just to use the video tag, at least from what I've seen.

Of course I'd love to be wrong on this, and will probably sign up for Netflix if I am.

That would be great... an HTML5 RIA with Flash embedded for video.

Let me play the devil's advocate here: what's wrong with true opt-in DRM, particularly for streaming? Most users think of video on a streaming site as being controlled by that site. If they want their own copy (and they're not trying to cop the stream) they go to a different kind of site or are clicking the download link if there's one. From the standpoint of user expectations, it's a completely different situation from downloading MP3 files to your hard drive.

In this case, DRM is completely consensual.

And no one is complaining. Trun was pointing out that it is unlikely that Netflix is going to switch to HTML5 video at the moment because there is no DRM available for it. The content providers won't go for it, the customers won't care.

It isn't so much the DRM as their choice of a DRM solution that only runs on Windows and Mac desktop systems. (Strictly speaking WinMo 7 as well.)

There's no reason to lock out my Droid like that, or my Linux desktop for that matter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com