how so? I really don't get it. how is moving from a plugin (flash/sliverlight) to html5 a bad thing as long as you can protect your content?

Yeah. Also, there's no requirement for the different DRM schemes to support the same codecs or containers or encryption schemes, so potentially they'll have to re-encode all their content for each scheme. It's actually less standardized than pay TV encryption believe it or not!

Edit: The interface between the DRM servers and your backend code isn't standardized either, so content providers still have to do a bunch of DRM-scheme-specific development work. Basically, they standardized just enough to allow sites with DRM to claim they're 100% HTML5, it barely improves interoperability at all.

Yeah, sure. Some sort of somewhat effective anti digital copying mechanism is a great way to enable video rentals on general purpose computers (especially given the pervasive copyright regime of modern video content).

There are issues to come when consumers only have access to encumbered media, but at the moment, they pretty clearly benefit from the access.