So apparently the W3C is passing a regulation soon enforcing something called EME, or Electronic Media Extensions. What this does is its basically a form of company-built DRM that is whitelisted for a certain number of browsers, right now the only ones listed being Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and MS Edge. What this does is it acts as a form of anti-theft DRM that will run in a browser to protect a company’s media, IE, if google made an EME for youtube you could no longer just download something with youtube-dl. Now part of this makes sense to me, to be honest. Apparently theres been issues of people stealing content from Prime and Netflix somehow because the DRM system they have has been cracked, according to reports. With an EME that the company can change at any time this doesn’t happen as easily.
I have a problem with that though. I’m a Vivaldi user on the desktop on literally everything. Even windows XP and 2000 machines have vivaldi on them. Yes, its BASED on chrome, but because its been heavily modified, a browser like vivaldi would need to go to the W3C and potentially the different media companies to get keys for their EME’s and keep up with them on any updates or changes to delivery and execution. This is a big hitter against non-mainstream browsers effectively making a pseudo-monopoly on them, which I do not like.
You know what browsers I like the most? Roccat and Pale Moon. With this EME stuff I won’t be able to use them for youtube anymore or really much of major content distributors. I don’t like that, and I don’t think that there should be anything enforced and shoved down peoples throats to not be able to have their browser of choice. I know people that download YT videos to watch offline or stream them to VLC, this completely kills that sort of media consumption. Not everyone’s use case is in a browser. Hell that even kills content solutions for older system like powerpc macs or sparc machines which people do have. Those may be fringe cases, but still they are a part of the user base. I for one actually prefer to have yt-dl download a favorite channel’s uploads to a folder and watch episodes when I want to because comcast kills our internet at random times to extort money from us all the time. You think I have all the options here in that case? Fuck no.
And this has already been voted on. It a matter of months this will be a thing. No more netflix or hulu or whatever on non-major platforms. What are consoles going to do? If they don’t have official apps what could happen? I’m thinking of the Wii U specifically, but the vita, 3DS… Their webapps for this stuff is based on Opera, and an outdated non-blink based one as well. Do they just not get it anymore?
Personally I think this is stupid. I get it, but theres no reason for it. Firefox 57 lets you sandbox tabs so you can run accounts all in one browser and separated, as does vivaldi and opera. Chrome is rolling that out soon too. Can there not be a similar system for DRM protections that server-side pushes out rather than enforcing a stupid standard?
It is more likely to hurt the businesses that use it than anything else. Most online or distribution based businesses make money per user. The more users they have, the more profit.
There are only three reasons anyone wants DRM. 1: People get self righteous boners from trying to stop online piracy. 2: Netflix wants to sign hollywood deals with people who follow rule 1. 3: EA. enough said.
The people who want to block pirates always loose because they usually block access to a number of paying users and the pirates still end up pirating stuff.
So history repeats itself. Netflix is going to end up screwing over a number of paying users so that they can make shitty hollywood deals that will do absolutely nothing for revenue. After a while, they will realize its a mistake, and DRM will go down as a “no no” in the digital media world which is precisely when EA will make a game based on and around DRM.
Which users will Netflix screw over that will make them realise their mistake? Netflix only works on Chrome and Firefox (recently) already, your not using palemoon with Netflix unless you went out of your way to turn palemoon into firefox. And I’d wonder if those browsers even register on their state for the small number of people who even use a browser for netflix.
I’d love to say your right, but you have to be more realistic, losing support for the 1% of 1% of people who hacked a browser to work with Netflix in the first place isn’t going to even register to them. It has to be done a different way.
EME is not DRM. All EME does is allow access to a DRM system.
Unfortunately any business model that relies on offering a streaming (on demand) service is not going to last very long without some form of content protection.
We are talking over a million dollars a quarter just in power bills to run servers every month. To put things in perspective, close to 20% of the worlds electricity usage is powering servers. Then there are global licensing fees which are billions of dollars.
Without DRM, services like Netflix would not exist.
DRM is definitely not the answer though, and it is a pain in the ass for legit consumers. We’ll eventually find a better way to access online content, it’s just that nobody has invented it yet.
The EFF left the W3C for this. This to a user isn’t a big deal as it makes DRM more “frictionless,” but propagating more DRM is not good for anyone. Of all people, Google’s the one making Widevine, the most widely used web DRM at this point, and they’re supposed to be supportive of open standards…
There’s almost nothing we can do if the industries just throw money at a problem and force it upon people.
Look at what happened with netflix at 4K and how you could only run it in microsoft edge browsers. If they were stupid enough to let that happen, I promise you they will do something stupid this time around too that will negatively impact their user base.
Do you honestly think these chimps can implement DRM in such a way that it is seamless for the 99% of users? Do you honestly think that this browser extension thing is going to work reliably? No.
I know some of the people at netflix, and its the same situation as every other company. The smart people are ignored and shunned and the stupid people run the company.
I promise you this will bomb in some form or another.
I don’t like pirating for the simple fact that I can stream stuff so I don’t have to have a crap ton of storage for everything.
If there were no data caps on phones, and coverage was better, I legit wouldn’t pirate a thing; even it was streamed with no DRM and could be easily copied.
Eh are you still using Presto Opera or what…
Just tried it and it works perfectly fine. Opera is Chrome.
The deal is pretty simple. People love to hate about DRM. But if there was no DRM people would love to hate about there not being any content accessible anywhere. And that it’s so hard to watch shit legally and mimimimimi. Basically how it was before browser based DRM was a thing (spoiler alert, it’s been there for years). The only difference is that it’s becoming a standard now, it’ll probably be going to use the same DRM system anyway.
It’s a necessary evil, nothing more then that.
They still need to go through the steps. As I said, its only the major browsers. If its based on it it still won’t matter. Its not something that just goes in the browser engine.
You do realise that the EME interface has been implemented in Chromium since… 2013(?) and is being used by Netflix for a few years now?
And for your example of Vivaldi, I’m using it too and it works perfectly fine.
EME (btw… Encrypted Media Extensions) is not the DRM. EME is an interface to load the DRM on demand. The DRM can be loaded as a plugin, which by the way Firefox has been doing for a year with Widevine. Firefox also incidentally frustrates sites from uniquely identifying your browser (which some services use to limit the number of devices).
I don’t know why it doesn’t work for you, but as I said it works fine for me, and I haven’t used Opera for 2 years or so, just updated.
Not an issue of Opera in general it seems.
My whole thing about DRM is that no one is going to use it if they don’t have to. The cost of implementing DRM and then maintaining/policing it is not trivial. The cost isn’t high enough to keep companies from trying it, but it will make companies think twice before they use it without a reason beyond antipiracy.
