[logicallee]

>That's all the DRM they need, you have no ability to consume these files without the Netflix app.

This is like saying that .doc files are as good as DRM'd, since who's going to open one in anything but Word?

I get what you're saying but it's a security through obscurity argument - if this takes off, of course someone can figure out the encoding and transcode straight from those files.

[morsch]

It's just the same security they use for streaming. If you can decode the chunks, you can also capture the streamed data and decode it.

[logicallee]

I would imagine downloads can be faster than 1x realtime, no? Having to stream things is a serious limit on ripping (transcoding) speed.

[brianwawok]

Whut?

You can write a stream to file with maybe 2 commands, and try to decode it later.

If the DRM on the stream is broken, you can save the stream to file and decode it later. If the DRM on the stream is safe, then it should be equally safe between the stream and saving the file to disk.

I fail to see how letting you save encrypted stuff to local disc has anything to do with breaking the DRM.

Also, the first thought people have when given a new service for free is "how can I use this to pirate movies". This is why we can't have nice stuff.....

[logicallee]

My comment has nothing to do with DRM. I'm saying, "if there is no DRM" (or it is broken or can be broken), then the difference between downloading and streaming might be the difference between taking 2.2 days to "stream to disk" Game of Thrones (60 episodes @ 55 minutes) -- or, say, downloading it in 4 hours. (If downloads are allowed to be faster than realtime, which would only make sense.) GoT is obviously a hypothetical example.

If you don't think that makes quite a real difference in enabling or incentivizing actual piracy then I think I'll just disagree - that rate limit is a huge difference in my book and makes it far more likely for someone to take the trouble to rip and transcode.

[izacus]

You imply that there's speed throttling when streaming. There's not and it makes no difference if you're connecting to a streaming endpoint or just getting a downloaded file.

(Which you can confirm by fast availability of streamed content on torrent sites or if you actually test the streams.)

[logicallee]

Thanks. Are you saying you could "stream" a 50 minute episode in 3 minutes even before this announcement?

Your second statement (about torrent sites) implies that everyone was already "downloading" content and NetFlix's servers were happy to serve the streams as a single very fast download without regard to how long it should takes clients to consume that (i.e. no throttling) - is this correct?