[BugsBunnySan]

You don't need EME to play video, HTML5 video can be played just fine without it.

AFAIK, You need EME to make sure that only browsers that have the Foo-Corporation EME plugin can play Foo-Corporation videos.

And to get the EME plugin for a browser, you need to ask permissions from Foo-Corporation to have it. So anyone writing a new browers (like Mozilla did with what became Firefox) will have to ask for this permission and will likely not just get it.

Seems like another example of where big companies got to where they are because the space they moved into was wide and open and free. But now that they have claimed that space and divided it up amongst a few players, they'll do their damned best to fence it of, wall it in and make sure none else can ever move into ever again.

[acdha]

> You don't need EME to play video, HTML5 video can be played just fine without it.

I'm quite aware of that but consider it from the perspective of a normal user using a non-Apple/Google/Microsoft browser:

1. Click on a link on YouTube, Hulu, etc. It's not DRMed, so it just works.

2. The next thing in the playlist is DRMed (e.g. it's premium, owned by a more restrictive publisher, etc.) and it doesn't play.

For people like us, step 3 might be “Decide you didn't want to play it that much” or “Complain to the provider”.

For the vast majority of users, step 3 is more like “Give up on Firefox and use Chrome/Edge/Safari”. How many of them will eventually stop using Firefox in the first place?

That's the real problem here – even if Firefox had 90% marketshare, it would evaporate quickly because switching is easy, users have a bunch of reasonable quality options, and most users don't feel that they're getting a bad deal.

EDIT: note that I'm not saying this is how I'd like it to work, only that anyone who thinks DRM is unjust needs to think about the millions of Netflix subscribers and both why and how those people should spend their $9/month elsewhere.