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Comment by cupofjoakim | Hacker News Reader

I'm still amazed how much effort is laid on the UX for consoles, while the browser version needs some urgent attention.

Why? Most people watch Netflix content on a television through a console or a set-top box. It makes complete sense to concentrate resources developing the experience for those markets rather than the browser. On tablets and phones people will use the app. I'd guess that the number of people looking at Netflix content in a browser is probably in the low single digit percentile range.

You'd be forgetting about the college kid with a laptop segment.

which i don't believe is a very high value segment - college and money don't mix very well imho.

No I'm not. Netflix has about 40 million subscribers. 5% of them ('low single digit percentile') would still be 2 million - easily enough to account for college students, people who travel a lot, children, etc once you discount those who have tablets.

There are 21 million college students in the US. 10% having Netflix accounts isn't completely out of the question, but it'd be a very impressive level of market penetration.

Anecdotally, when I was in college, no one paid for their own account, they just used their parent's.

Among Netflix users, 48% watch on a computer screen (up from 44% last year); 23% watch on a smartphone (up from 11%); 15% watch on their iPad, way up from 5% last year. But the percentage of users who reported using Roku or Nintendo's Wii game console dropped this year.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2013/09/18/netflix-hul...

With Silverlight and Flash dying there is no longer a good platform on the web for their kind of experience. They might just wait 5 years until HTML5 is finally good enough.

It's good enough now. They just have to give up on DRM.

No, proper DRM support is what will make it good.

How exactly do users benefit from DRM?

It allows them to access content that they otherwise couldn't.

Isn't it the bad effect of DRM rather than a benefit!

DRM is only a hinderance to legit users. Pirates are pirates and DRM isn't something they deal with.

Uh, no. That's some impressive exec-level doublethink.

Content is open by default.

DRM is a method by which you prevent people from accessing content.

How so? This guy has a show he won't let me use unless I agree to try and control access. My choices are access with stupid crap like DRM or no access. Sure a third option like free access to everyone everywhere would be great, but that guy won't go for it. Until we can talk that guy in to going for it DRM increases access. Sure it doesn't grant maximal access but access is greater than it is without DRM.

Then "this guy" you mention is ignorant of how technology and piracy work and any rational person should push back.

DRM is not "necessary" by any possible meaning of the word. It's forced upon people by the ignorant.

Necessary in the way that a drivers license and car insurance are necessary to drive.

There is a legitimate need to ensure that people who drive both know how to do so safely and can handle any accidents financially.

There is no legitimate need to hamper fair use in the way that DRM does, especially considering that it fails at its goals.

I have yet to see a single use-case where DRM has improved my experience. Like most people, I have seen countless cases where DRM has significantly degraded it.

Your statement is in dire need of things to back it up.

Netflix and Steam haven't improved your experience? Their very existence depends on DRM.

Phonographs and music CD's don't have DRM, yet they exist, and have been very profitable for studios. If DRM had never been invented, we would still probably have DVD's (whose DRM is so broken it may as well not exist) and Netflix.

The discussion isn't "what exists", but rather "does DRM'd things improve the experience of the thing". Yes, there are DRM-free versions of things, or broken-DRM versions. Gog.com is a competitor to Steam that deals in DRM-free games, but their catalog isn't nearly as extensive because many studios won't put their games out there DRM-free. Steam freed us from CDs and DVDs that can get broken or lost, and freed us from typing in CD keys. That minor improvement was enough to make stores all but stop selling PC games.

The question is, does Netflix streaming have a better experience than DVDs? I argue yes (as evidenced by the fact that Blockbuster is out of business and Netflix is booming). CDs don't have DRM but Spotify does. People use Spotify because it's more convenient. People don't use it because of the DRM, but studios are willing to trust it because it has DRM.

The point I'm arguing against is "DRM has never improved the experience". I point to two things that exist because of DRM that are arguably more convenient and have a better UX than the DRM-free or broken-DRM versions.

I see you're getting downvoted, and I honestly think you've missed the point, but at least I'll give you a quick reply.

> The point I'm arguing against is "DRM has never improved the experience". I point to two things that exist because of DRM

You point to digital media. Digital media has existed as long as digital media has existed. DRM is a much newer thing. It has done nothing to enhance digital media, except restrict its ability to be enjoyed.

That some short-sighted dinosaurs insist that they must have DRM to release digital media does in no way mean DRM improves or provides the experience of digital media. It just means that some people want to reduce the experience of something which was working fine in the first place as a prerequisite to ship.

That's their decision and their call to make, but they have been proven wrong about that in the past and will be proven wrong again.

What you say it true, but that's missing my point. Yes, I understand that DVDs and CDs and records and tapes have been around forever. But Netflix hasn't. Steam hasn't. They only became viable (in the studio's eyes) when DRM became possible. Digital distribution could have been done for a long time. It wasn't (officially) until there was some method of controlling it.

That's the entirety of my point. DRM doesn't make digital media possible, it makes studios accepting of digital distribution, which is an improvement on user experience.

Their very existence depends upon the continued good will of Big Content. DRM could disappear tomorrow and Netflix (not to mention thousands of other sites) would be better for it.

Well, except that without DRM you wouldn't have the content to watch in the first place. Legally that is. As long as DRM is a requirement for copyrighted content you will have DRM.

It generally feels like a rich document that was hacked to be interactive enough to resemble a GUI.

It's barely acceptable even if they didn't need drm. You'd want HLS or some other adaptive bitrate switching technology as well as consistent support for H.264 video.

Also it's not Netflix's choice the studios hoist DRM on them. Unless your solution is dropping the cast majority of their library in order to support the video tag.

Unfortunately, with EME in Chrome OS, content owners won't have to give up on DRM any time soon for Netflix to switch to HTML5.

(On ARM-based Chromebooks, Netflix already uses an HTML5 interface.)

Silverlight is such a waste of resources and a pox of vulnerabilities. Flash is bad, Silverlight is worse and the sooner services everyone uses stop using them the better.

Yet it had a superior GUI mark-up language and supported more than one back-end language (C#, VB, F# to begin with).

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