Netflix doesn’t do it because they want to. They do it because it’s part of the licensing agreements they sign to get content.
In some cases you might get 720p (Netflix content) instead of 540p (third party) with widevine L3.
[1] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/why-can-i-only-see-net...
Is it?
I doubt it's a significant cost center. Plus, right management is viewed favourably by the rest of the entertainment industry. Actively going against the grain would impair their image with their commercial partners.
I honestly think they don't care at this point.
This is obviously what we would actually want.
Buffering delays can be greatly reduced, if not eliminated entirely, by simply sending the whole file but in the past many upstream content providers insisted on limits for the amount of buffering/storage in the client.
Fortunately you can now download entire videos in the app, though they're undoubtedly encumbered by DRM of some sort.
If you could just right click and choose “download” for any Netflix original don’t you think that would be a problem for them?
Casual pirates wouldn't bother right-clicking in the first place unless it's to store a local copy that they won't even know how to share effectively (since they're casual).
The only thing DRM achieves for netflix is deterring new customers and hurting existing ones.
The fact they can’t do that is a benefit.
For the piracy scene, sure. It’s irrelevant.
But for normal people the difference is huge. They may not know how to pirate content, where to go to find it, or be willing risk downloading it and getting in trouble (scary FBI warnings and ISP letters).
But once it’s trivial due to the lack of protection it will be all over TikTok and FB and WAY more people will pirate. Those are the people DRM, even light DRM, stop.
Out of their more than 231 million subscribing households around the world, I don't think more than 5,000 feel the way you think. Even if 55,000 felt that way it doesn't matter.
If we accept that enabling DRM on some of their content has some value to Netflix, which it obviously does, and we accept that it doesn't impose unacceptable user experience tradeoffs, which it obviously doesn't, then it is rational for them to enable it on all of their content.
There is probably a hypothetical cost/benefit break-even point where it actually degrades the user experience a little and thus is only acceptable in cases where it is absolutely needed, but it seems unlikely this is significant enough to even be quantifiable.
Is it? Anyone is able to use obs studio these days, you know, to be an influencer. It is all I needed to "backup" offline versions of some shows for my kids before we would take a plane. I am pretty sure I could have torrented them out as well.
They definitely license music for their original which likely requires requiring DRM.
They would make offend influential huge organizations in the background of copyright monetization which could cause them tons of problems.
This is also why streaming video catalogs in Netflix and other providers can be anemic at times—even assuming nothing is exclusively licensed elsewhere, it's cost-prohibitive for Netflix to license all the media out there. Instead, they license popular stuff and use the rest of their licensing budget to rotate in/out a selection of less popular content.
There are probably millions of people subscribed to Netflix merely because pirating Netflix content is inconvenient enough to make people rather pay. How many would reconsider this if the user experience of pirating was exactly as convenient as a paid Netflix account?
Most probably enough so that enacting DRM is the smaller price to pay.
It took a day to get onto the torrent sites.
So that was the first instance I've seen where buying was better than pirating.
I did see comments on the torrent sites from people who were there because their legitimate paid setup was deemed incompatible with live streams by Netflix though... Not a great incentive to keep paying.
The people extracting the content are people who do subscribe. The user experience of the people who pirate instead of subscribing is completely unaffected by DRM because the DRM is removed by the time it gets to them.
All the DRM does is make the experience of piracy better than that of subscribing, by inconveniencing paying customers and not pirates.
Notice that the people complaining about DRM are almost never pirates, who have cracked it all already. They're people who want to pay Netflix money so they can watch Netflix on their weird Linux setup or whatever instead of just downloading whatever they want in the Netflix catalog from the piracy sites, which would be much easier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
You can make this argument for DRM on games, because there is no analogue hole - I can't record me playing a game and give someone else the exact same experience (although some publishers try to restrict this too, not realizing that streamers and youtubers are just giving them free advertising by playing their games).