[AOsborn]

> They can go 100 years without publishing on the web, since they have other revenue paths that they're perfectly happy with.

I accept your logic but disagree with your premise. Online media is the future, and any media company knows this.

[AlexMax]

They do not need the web to distribute their content online.

[AnthonyMouse]

Then let them suffer the loss of revenue from losing all of those potential customers. Content producers who don't use DRM will be happy to take those customers from them, and those will be the content producers who have more money with which to make new content tomorrow.

[majormajor]

Native apps on tablets, phones, and set top boxes are the future (present, really) of that, anyway.

Linux users could be a bit more screwed if publishers had to move to Windows/Mac apps if interested in desktop/laptop users, but otherwise it wouldn't be a big impact for the big properties.

What's the difference to a user of opening a Netflix app vs going there in the browser? Basically nothing.

Do we want apps on the web, or in the OS—that's the only question here. Browser vendors are incentivized to provide a path for apps in browser, because otherwise they become less relevant. And so this is the result.

(Personally I'd rather have OS-level native apps anyway. So please, kill DRM in the browser. Browsers are massive resource hogs. Netflix devs would probably be happy too to not have to deal with cross-browser-compatibility shit. The web is a mess already.)

[AnthonyMouse]

> Linux users could be a bit more screwed if publishers had to move to Windows/Mac apps if interested in desktop/laptop users

There is not any kind of real difference between not having a native app (or whatever WINE patches are needed to run it) and not having some platform-specific EME black box binary.

> What's the difference to a user of opening a Netflix app vs going there in the browser? Basically nothing.

For Netflix? Basically nothing. For the other 99.9% of websites that aren't as big as Netflix? Users balk at installing apps from little known sources, so those websites then won't have DRM.

[majormajor]

Linux is a small meaningless edge case for these companies anyway, I just mentioned it because the portability of a plugin is much higher than of a full native app - so if there's any chance it'll be supported, it's in the web-based world.

How many sites will be using this outside of stuff like Netflix/Amazon/PS Vue/Sling and co? Buying someone's DRM solution or building your own only makes sense for high-dollar content?

But again, from my perspective as someone who wants to write code for anything but browsers, anything that moves dev jobs away from the web is good news for me.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Linux is a small meaningless edge case for these companies anyway, I just mentioned it because the portability of a plugin is much higher than of a full native app - so if there's any chance it'll be supported, it's in the web-based world.

It's already supported both ways. Chrome on Linux can play Netflix, and before that there were third party packages that would install the Netflix app for Windows along with all of the patches necessary to make it run on Linux.

It should obviously also be possible to run the Netflix app for Android on Linux, as demonstrated by the fact that all the phones are doing it.

It doesn't really matter how hard it is to make it work, because for a high value target like Netflix, someone will make it work. And none of that will actually satisfy the free software people regardless, because it's a binary blob either way.

> How many sites will be using this outside of stuff like Netflix/Amazon/PS Vue/Sling and co? Buying someone's DRM solution or building your own only makes sense for high-dollar content?

How many sites used to use Flash?

You have to expect that somebody is going to produce a low dollar cost DRM system (which is correspondingly even more buggy and ineffective) and market it to managers who don't know any better.

[kelnos]

> Users balk at installing apps from little known sources

Do they? With the rise of the Mac App Store and whatever similar MS is doing, I doubt they much care.

[AnthonyMouse]

What rise of the Mac App Store? The only reason anybody even uses the iOS App Store is that there is no other way to distribute iOS apps.

If it was easy to install mobile apps direct from the author's website as on a desktop, who would voluntarily be paying app stores 30% of their revenue?