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Comment by depressedpanda | Hacker News Reader

The point is, the extra "protection" is worthless.

Not worthless, actively harmful to the user experience, and therefore actively harmful to the bottom line.

But I doubt the harmed people will feel materially less harmed if some tiny fraction of content isn't in harm's way while the rest still is.

It's in their interest to get rid of all the DRM, so it's a matter of setting an example. If they try to get Hollywood to stop demanding it while they're still doing it themselves, they look like hypocrites and fools. If they stop they can demonstrate the worthlessness of it and the success of their content without it and try to get others to follow.

> It's in their interest to get rid of all the DRM, so it's a matter of setting an example.

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.

It’s not. It’s enough to deter casual piracy. There is some value in that.

If you could just right click and choose “download” for any Netflix original don’t you think that would be a problem for them?

> It’s not. It’s enough to deter casual piracy. There is some value in that.

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.

I’ve known enough casual pirates like that in my life. People who would sign up for Netflix for one month every three years and immediately download everything and then cancel again.

The fact they can’t do that is a benefit.

Most pirates are not subscribed in the first place. They just download something someone else had removed DRM from, which also makes it a superior experience. It only takes one pirate with a decent computer to encode a good DRM-free copy for it to be shared via BitTorrent. It is pointless to deter casual piracy when one "professional" pirate is enough to free the content.

> It is pointless to deter casual piracy when one "professional" pirate is enough to free the content.

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.

The way I like to put it is with an phrase your hear sometimes in the lock picking community. Locks actually don't really offer much protection. Their main function is to "keep an honest man honest."

Perfect saying. For DRM it needs to be effective enough to stop most people, even if that’s very weak in absolute terms.

> The only thing DRM achieves for netflix is deterring new customers and hurting existing ones.

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.

This. DRM is a courtesy lock on a bathroom door. It makes ripping content enough of a hassle that only people who are willing to put some effort in will bother, and those people are going to find a way around it no matter what. It doesn't have to be unbreakable to have some value to the content owner.

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.

> It’s not. It’s enough to deter casual piracy. There is some value in that.

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.

It's not worthless though, because if it didn't exist - some browser extension would appear the next day which adds a nice little download right next to the play button.

> a nice little download right next to the play button

This is obviously what we would actually want.

But we are talking about Netflix's motivations, not ours. And Netflix does not want this download button.

I'm not.

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.

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