[cscotta]

I've read through this post a few times and am having some difficulty understanding both the original problem and the solution that Greg is suggesting.

From what I can gather, it seems that Netflix's product development team is frustrated to find that there is no integrated support for DRM'd media streams provided by the OS. From here, he jumps to the conclusion that the best approach is working with individual handset manufacturers to patch in support for this at the OS or kernel level. This is difficult to understand.

It's an operating system. You build things on top of it. One does not go to every PC manufacturer to add a "feature" to one.

Spectres of "fragmentation" aside, let's remember that these phones are real computers running a real Linux-based OS that run real software, written in real programming languages like C, Java, and Scala. They also have support for encrypted transports like SSL and high-quality video codecs like H.264. Heck, Adobe's even done it - secure content streaming on Android is possible, and works fine (speaking strictly of the transport and decoding layer - leave it to the bloggeurs to hash over what happens when you paint content on a screen).

These facts suggest that implementing secure DRM'd video streams and a player for them is not only possible, but much easier than working directly with two of the most backward-facing industries in technology now (film studios and mobile phone providers) to add this functionality.

[bigmac]

The problem comes down to key-hiding. You can encrypt it all you want but if the attacker can extract the key from the software the game is over.

Working with the mobile phone providers, you can embed the root key in hardware. This makes it more difficult to extract. Straight software solutions exist, but are typically provided 3rd parties or by the OS vendors themselves. The software solutions are obviously more convenient, for the reasons you've alluded to.

Netflix gets to make lots of money exactly because they do the hard work of working with the backward-facing industries.

[wmf]

But why is Android any worse than, say, Windows XP in this respect?

[bigmac]

The encryption/decryption libraries exist on Windows. For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_DRM

[jpravetz]

I think that Netflix also doesn't want to be in the business of building the full secured/DRM code stack on all these platforms themselves. They'd rather leverage. And for whatever reasons I believe they are/were a Microsoft video encoding shop on the backend, which can limit their choices (e.g. they won't use Adobe Access on Flash, which is not universal either).

[sukuriant]

I direct you to the nutjob123 conversation tree on this very topic, starting here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1901128