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0 pointsizacus9y ago0 comments

Your question implies that there's any practical use for that DRM in streaming services. There's not and it does nothing useful but annoy users.

Anyone with ounce of motivation can easily bypass and extract the media content, so the only thing DRM does is piss of paying users which can't watch content on flaky connections, flights, travel and alternative operating systems.

Meanwhile on torrent sites you find Netflix digital dumps in matter of minutes after release.

0 comments

JeremyBanks9y ago

Anyone with ounce of motivation can easily bypass and extract the media content

This is obviously untrue. For at least 95% of Netflix users this is inconceivably difficult. Peek out your bubble and you may also notice that torrent use is massively declining in popularity because they're a horrible user experience.

jrnichols9y ago

> you may also notice that torrent use is massively declining in popularity because they're a horrible user experience.

The people that use Popcorn Time/etc would disagree. That has been a fantastic experience, so it's natural that the MPAA would go after it tooth & nail.

eridius9y ago

DRM also provides more legal protections to the content providers when someone breaks it.

fastball9y ago

Not true.

An important use for DRM in regards to streaming services is to prevent people on shared networks from getting access to the data. For instance, if I was in a college dorm with dorm-wide wifi, and I was watching my de-DRM'd Netflix, anyone on the dorm intranet could snoop my packets and get the data being transmitted to me by Netflix, for free.

That is nigh on impossible to do when the content is encrypted with DRM.

izacusOP9y ago

Never in my times of working for content provider / transport was that even remotely the reason for DRM.

It was always passing the legal buck ("It wasn't us that let those evil evil pirates steal your series, we did all we could, look at that DRM software certificate!").

Snooping packets in dorm rooms? No.

rudolf09y ago

Not to mention that even if it were an issue, TLS would be a much easier and cheaper solution.

ulrikrasmussen9y ago

To be fair, simple end-to-end encryption of non-DRM'd material would accomplish the same.

Spivak9y ago

What? You're just talking about TLS. This has absolutely nothing to do with client-side DRM modules.

serge2k9y ago

TLS solves that problem.

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