Netflix Continues To Disappoint Linux Users
benjaminkerensa.com
benjaminkerensa.com
Wouldn't surprise me if it was a contractual obligation from Microsoft. In the past they were extremely aggressive in offering incentives and juicy licence terms for companies that would help push Silverlight.
I don't know what juicy license terms would be , considering I can stick a flash or HTML5 video on my website without paying adobe or W3C a cent.
If you want to prevent your movie from appearing on the pirate bay in a DRM free format you have to make it so that nobody in the entire world is capable of recording the stream.
Even if you make sure the stream remains encrypted all the way from the server to the monitor, at some point it has to be decrypted in order to play. You only need one guy with the skills to take his monitor apart and modify it to feed the input into the actual OLEDs into another device. Once that happens it's game over.
The only way to really win would be prevent consumer playback devices from actually playing DRM Free content at all and insist that all content is signed. In essence force every consumer who wants to pirate to make a hardware modification.
This just points to the fact that software is notoriously difficult to keep safe via DRM, and that people _want_ the content, just not at the price point that large publishers are selling at, and people _think_ that the price point should be lower.
The issue is that the lower price point in the case of piracy appears to be free. People still pirate $1 iphone apps.
this is a very key quote - it indeed drops the rate of piracy. But does it increase the profits earned correspondingly? that is, did the anti-piracy measures contribute positively to profit?
I am unsure what the case is in reality, since its so hard to compare. Most pirate's intuition is that anti-piracy measures don't increase the profits (or unit sold, so as not to complicate currency+accounting issues). Companies that use anti-piracy measures seem to think the exact opposite.
Their reasoning was that Silverlight had better DRM so people couldn't rip the films. However they also offered a DVD rental service , so you could get any of the streamable films (plus a load more) delivered through the post at which point it would be trivial to rip them.
I haven't looked but I'm pretty sure all of the films they offered for streaming are available as torrents too and probably at much higher quality.
Quibbling here, physically ripping a DVD is much less trivial than simply recording a stream.
If you know a good way of ripping streams please tell me, wrangling Orbit's invasive and buggy plugin was the only thing that worked to grab RTMP the last time I tried.
A source-only netflix wouldn't fly. So, they would need to get developers, packagers, QA, and support for either one or multiple distributions and many different hardware configurations, not to mention dealing with linux's plethora of audio subsystems and graphics driver issues.
It's possible to test on every ChromeOS device. It's much more expensive to QA and support every linux desktop configuration. Perhaps it's just not worth it because there are so few desktop linux users. The expected income would need to be much more than paying for linux devs/packagers/QA/support before it is a good business move.
It might be that there is other software beyond Chrome itself that Netflix relies on in Chromebooks, and that software may or may not play nice with arbitrary distributions.
Example wild speculation: Netflix for the Chromebooks relies on a kernel extension for DRM, and they know they wouldn't be able to get the desktop Linux community at large to swallow that pill.
Which would be a preposterous thing to worry about. Why worry about breaking the DRM on crappy Netflix streams when you can either record straight from TV (and thus distribute brand new shows 15 minutes after they air) or rip straight from DVD/Blu-ray (and thus have a considerable quality advantage over Netflix)? Apart from the very small amount of Netflix-exclusive content (which hasn't been very notable, which granted will change with Arrested Development), the Netflix DRM does absolutely nothing except make customers worry about what devices are compatible.
How so? In my personal experience it's Windows users who pirate the most software by far. Linux users choose an OS with far fewer commercial desktop apps and generally make do with open-source applications. Linux users have also been shown to pay more for indie games and apps and have been vocal in wanting Steam on Linux so they can throw money at Valve. Given how easy it is to rile up many Linux users with accusations of GPL infringement, I'd say that they generally understand and care more about IP laws than the average Windows user.
Old joke, "Netflix works GREAT on Linux, get a Roku box."
So "Netflix on Linux" is really 'NetFlix on a Linux running on a Laptop.' But here is the reality, if you make a list ordered by how many people would benefit of things you could put a Netflix client on, "Linux based laptops" would be nearly the bottom of the list, right above the Chumby. But if you made a list of "things we could do to irritate skittish big-content types" putting out a Netflix client on a Linux based system would be at near top of the list. That is a killer combination that I doubt will be dealt with soon.
1. Is that someone demanded this from the distribution company. We know the MPAA, RIAA, etc can make odd decisions about this sorta thing 2. They can't find the engineers. They struggled for the Android engineers and had (still do?) have open positions for it. That's how we knew Netflix was coming to Android long before anything was seen. They had job postings for Android video experts.
Anyway, to answer your question, it has nothing to do with desktop linux but rather hardware. Chromebook, most Android devices, Roku etc typically have hardware DRM enabled that allows Netflix to run on the device.
"Setting aside the debate around the value of content protection and DRM, they are requirements we must fulfill in order to obtain content from major studios for our subscribers to enjoy."
If Netflix was that important to desktop linux users, the distros would have coaxed a Silverlight implementation from MS or worked on the HAL-Flash schism or done SOMETHING to enable video streaming services to do their legal duty to their content providers. They didn't, no Netflix for you. Hardware DRM assistance is helpful, but clearly not required.
Funny, I thought the stock price taking a dive was because of the Qwikster fiasco. And I thought the falling subscriber base was because of the separation of streaming and DVD plans paired with a lack of good content that is available to be streamed.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/104957/is-it-possible-to-inst...
However, it may be the case that the display ends up being quite small.
Also, the people who want Netflix for Linux already can get it on iOS, Android Xbox 360, PS3, Roku, Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, Apple TV, and on and on and on, so how many more Netflix subscribers are going to join that haven't already? Is that going to be enough money to offset the extra support costs as well as the likely PR nightmare described above?
If it works on Ubuntu it can probably be ported easy enough. However maybe they are worried about getting support calls from people running Fluxbox?
They're better than some, but spend a few years in real "corporate" environments, and you'll experience first hand a surfeit of such "taking, not giving" attitudes.
If Netflix is merely the middleman, I nonetheless increasingly am coming to view them as an enabler of some very selfish people, people inhibiting and destructing our society in the pursuit of their own self-interests.
A company like Netflix has to target relatively consistent environments -- operating systems -- so a much more honest question would be to ask if Netflix will support Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Mint, etc. In that case, the question is its own answer ("no, none of those are big enough"). Diversity can be a weakness just as it can be a strength.
Once you support one distro you are essentially supporting them all, even if not officially. Even though Ubuntu is going in it's own direction with Unity etc pretty much all of the base libs are the same.
I could understand if they said "Yes, we support Ubuntu 12.04 only" in which case that would basically mean "you can probably get it to work on any distro under the sun but don't call us about it".