When the choice is between proprietary apps or DRM for multimedia content inside open web environment, I'd rather have the latter.
Yes, in ideal world there will be DRM-free streaming - but unfortunately that's unrealistic.
Yes, in ideal world there will be DRM-free streaming - but unfortunately that's unrealistic.
Why? That puts the cost of DRM on everyone except the ones who want to freeload on our open tech to take our freedom away.
And that's ass backwards.
You want non-free and closed? Cool deal. Go build it yourself.
This argument implicitly assumes that the big cost of DRM is actually implementing the DRM. Everyone knows that isn't true. The social cost of DRM is the effect on the users' freedom, and if the users are using entirely proprietary applets they're probably less free than if they depend on a single proprietary library.
Why is it unrealistic? Hollywood just needs to be pushed harder. It worked for music no?
Movies are a great deal more fractured, and they will remain fractured. The movie studios will not let Netflix turn into the iTunes for movies.
Unlike with video, where the signal ends up unencrypted only on the very last chip in the chain, namely the one that drives the (I'm taking a guess here!) thousands of pixel lines, this is not practical with audio signals - you can always intercept and easily record the signal in analog form, either right before the PA stage or if this does not work (because the D/A converter and PA are implemented on one chip) after the PA output. The signal will of course be affected by the PA frequency characteristics, but that can be compensated for - and you still get a perfect audio signal.
Also, I highly doubt that professional/semi-professional home theater setups will ever ship with "smart" (i.e. more wires than just the +/- heavy-gauge, direct speaker power signal wires) speakers, so you get the analog hole right there, on the output matrix of the amp.