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Comment by dj2stein9 | Hacker News Reader

I think if your intention is to encrypt your video content then you really have no business being on the web in the first place. Just build a native app and do whatever you want, and stop trying to bend open standards to be compatible with your business.

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Or, people get to use the web however they want without rigid "open everything" extremism. Netflix is the best business model on the internet right now: you pay them $X a month, get great content, everyone gets paid. DRM makes that possible. I find it far preferable to the advertising/spyware-based monetization model, which seems to be the only other viable business model for content on the internet. The internet standards should be flexible enough to accommodate both and let consumers choose.

> DRM makes that possible

O'RLY? That seems like a big jump of logic there. It's just as possible that with zero DRM they'd still do fine given playing back a movie in Netflix is far nicer than searching for the movie on some ad-ridden virus infested download site and then waiting several minutes to hours for it to be available.

So the content producers are in the clear, right up until someone comes up with a user-friendly interface for doing Netflix -> DVD rips.

The point of DRM isn't to make it impossible for some people to copy the content. It's to make it inconvenient for ordinary people to copy the content. That's what the big problem with Napster was (after all, people have been copying content on Usenet since the dawn of time).

With the current scheme house of cards was outside netflix within a week (if not the same day) So content producers are already doomed, why saddle html5 with DRM and binary blobs?

Well Netflix has less of an incentive for DRM on their own content, since they don't have any DVD/Blu-Ray sales to protect. But to the extent that unencrypted streams make it easier for unsophisticated users to rip DVDs from streams, it's a relevant consideration for the big media companies that offer content on Netflix.

In the long run, content producers will survive because the general purpose PC will be marginalized as a platform. The future is not people watching torrent-ed rips of movies on their laptops, it's people watching Netflix and similar services on their Apple TVs and iPads. At that point it doesn't matter if the content is encrypted or not, since it won't be convenient for your typical user to watch a ripped copy.

You're quite the prognosticator.

I would argue that the content producers will survive in spite of the fact that they lose the battle to create an entirely hands off encrypted media path from the website to your viewing device.

They will survive because they make their content easy to buy. They will survive /well/ if they make their content easy to buy and to license.

> So the content producers are in the clear, right up until someone comes up with a user-friendly interface for doing Netflix -> DVD rips.

Such programs are already available and are quite user-friendly.

I love Netflix being a separate app on my mobile devices. Going through the browser seems hacky.

What if Apple decides to ban Netflix from the store due to a perceived slight, or because Apple decides to compete directly?

Switch to an Android phone?

Apple won't support this browser encryption extension scheme on iDevices in any case.

Then it's a very good thing so people understand that you cannot rely on a platform where one company has all the power on what can run and what can't. Maybe it'd spring see nice anti-competitive trials. Results being irrelevant, as long as people understand that locked platforms are bad.

Native player supports AES 128 encrypted video.

Earlier iOS supports encrypted chunks, iOS 6 and up supports encryption of audio and video samples as well.

The HTML5 based DRM would require a binary blob for the browser so that's not likely to happen for the iPad/iPhone anyway.

They're are many legit reasons to encrypt video (CCTV, video chats, etc). The web is the platform of the near future, I'd rather support this stuff natively than need multiple closed source desktop or mobile apps.

this isn't about encrypting it to prevent others from seeing it. It's about encrypting it so the viewer can't control it.

Encryption != DRM. All of that stuff you can do now with SSL. No one cares about video streams over SSL. It's what happens after the SSL layer that matters.

Indeed, but you're not going far enough. I never buy from any website that uses HTTPS! The idiots running them don't appreciate the open way the web is meant to be used.

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