As dumb and broken as it is, the state of the world is such that you can't deliver most video without something like it.
So the options are:
1. Stick to your guns and keep it out of the standard, free browsers will be unable to play Netflix, Hulu, HBOGo, BBC, etc... Propriety plugins that only work on one browser and/or one platform will exist and be annoying and buggy.
2. Give in and allow this braindamage in the standard because it means most browsers will be able to support video streaming from most sites.
3. Convince the MPAA and all of their members and all of the worldwide organizations like it that DRM is bad and that they should stop demanding it.
In the realm of what the W3C can accomplish, #2 seems like the least worst solution.
> Option 1 is the best because playing DRM content should be Netflix's problem.
By not making it a standard we'll make sure that Neflix never, ever comes to Linux. That guarantees that proprietary operating systems, browsers and hardware will always be prevalent.
> By making it a standard it means that we'll never, ever get rid of it.
<marquee> and <blink> were standards. NPAPI was a quasi-standard.
Black-and-white worldviews are often accurate albeit negligently unrealistic.
My understanding is that it's using basically what the W3C is now considering. The browser manufacturers already decided on this months ago and implemented it. Now the question is if it becomes part of the standard so there aren't annoying differences between each browser.
Agreed. However, Widevine is Google's thing and it's plausible that they'd ship it with some non-free build of Chrome. Unless they're worried about trusting the OS, in which case my original argument is void.
In most browsers, they aren't actually plugins in the typical sense. As far as I'm aware, Chrome doesn't allow any other EME modules to be installed, so if a provider wants to work with Chrome they must support Widevine.
Put yourself in the shoes of a browser dev faced with a torrent of angry users asking why you "broke Netflix". They won't listen to what seems like a wishy-washy response about the principles of "the open Internet", all they will care about is that they had Netflix and now they don't and it's your fault.
Devil's advocate, I'm no fan of DRM, but from the end user's point of view, it's a necessity.
If (in an ideal world) Chrome and Firefox had said "no, we aren't implementing it" then it falls back to Netflix to stop harming users. And they need to make business so they'll make a crappy SilverLight client that breaks every other week. It's not the browser developers' fault that a several million dollar company decided to build their business model around the need for DRM.
The biggest problem with taking the principled stand is that you run into the prisoner's dilemma. And every CS student can tell you that the game theory says you should always defect, if the other parties are adversarial.
I think the biggest problem in the "browser game" is that the different free browsers often see each other as enemies and not as friendly competition. It's a shame because monocultures are what almost killed the internet in the early days, and I don't understand why we're heading back to ActiveX.
In an ideal world nobody would want DRM. In the real world, Chrome and Firefox are not part of the same team, and never were. Google is a media distribution platform like Netflix (YouTube, Play, etc), and like them, they have zero interest in pissing off producers based on lofty ideals.
It boils down to what is more important for user: will they change browser to play DRMed videos or switch video provider to one without DRM.
Not supporting EME in browser with falling usage (Firefox) is likely suicide, but W3C doesn't make browsers and can take any ideological position without consequences.
Free browsers can't play Netflix anyway, because EME is just a standardized interface to a proprietary CDM, which one must license from a vendor (Microsoft of Google mostly).
What giving in achieved is a reasonable security story around the CDM module as opposed to the free for all of NPAPI plugins. It still totally sucks, but at least hte capabilities of these CDMs are quite limited.
So the options are:
1. Stick to your guns and keep it out of the standard, free browsers will be unable to play Netflix, Hulu, HBOGo, BBC, etc... Propriety plugins that only work on one browser and/or one platform will exist and be annoying and buggy.
2. Give in and allow this braindamage in the standard because it means most browsers will be able to support video streaming from most sites.
3. Convince the MPAA and all of their members and all of the worldwide organizations like it that DRM is bad and that they should stop demanding it.
In the realm of what the W3C can accomplish, #2 seems like the least worst solution.