[the_other]

Would the web have survived as a "popular" destination without EME?

I imagine that the w3c saw that large corporations had most of the attention of most netizens. Those large content producers/distributers want DRM. Did the w3c fear that if they hadn't accepted EME, most of those netizens would move off the web and onto the native apps which the video streaming companies would, inevitably, have produced?

I say "inevitably" because most of them stream to native and web anyway these days, and in many cases the native apps are wrappers around HTML5 players. In a way, the w3c's acceptance of EME allowed its reach to extend to more devices, where if they hadn't taken EME on the web may have shrunk.

(I'm kinda just thinking out loud here. Sorry for the rambling)

[blip54321]

Yes, the web would have survived.

Streaming is a tiny portion of what the web is used for.

Even so, entertainment should be... entertaining. I got free Paramount Plus with my phone service. It has DRM, adblocker-detectors, and all sorts of other nonsense to where it usually doesn't play videos. I went with Youtube over Star Trek. That's not an ideological choice; it's just not entertaining to fight with computers to play a video or to talk to support.

I suspect the effect would have been the opposite: a more rapid decline of the major content producers. This stuff needs to be easy and to work. Netflix did that, before everyone started to jump ship. Napster did it well too.

At some point, there's a spiral, where:

- Declining usability / quality leads to declining viewership

- Declining viewership leads to declining budget

- Declining budget lead to declining usability / quality and more pressure on monetization

... and so on. That's the disruption S-curve. In retrospect, I'm guessing that would have happened if large content producers forced apps.

[lelandfe]

> Streaming is a tiny portion of what the web is used for.

By bandwidth, streaming is what the majority of the web is used for. PDF warning: https://www.sandvine.com/hubfs/downloads/phenomena/2018-phen...

> Video is almost 58% of the total downstream volume of traffic on the internet

[parrellel]

But video is probably the most data-intensive thing most people interact with. How many webpages, books, songs, pdfs is equivalent to a 4 minute 1080p Youtube video?

[jchw]

At risk of sounding optimistic, I think EME has really bolstered adoption of the open and DRM-free BitTorrent protocol for media streaming. I didn't do any actual head-to-head comparisons, but movies that come out on services like Paramount+ also tend to get a simultaneous release on BitTorrent trackers, albeit for some reason it usually isn't mentioned in the trailer. Despite the lack of advertising, though, it really seems to work: on some recent movies, stats I've seen on trackers show very impressive results for the BitTorrent box office. One movie I looked at had been seeded possibly millions of times in just a few days.

So I am really thankful for EME for helping to support open standards in that regard.

[zinekeller]

Nope, I don't think EME is the reason piracy has another boom. Looking at music stats, while there is still a thriving piracy community most people now gave up and pay for music streaming services, and it's easy to see why. Most record companies and artists (reluctantly) accept that it'll be better if there's something rather than nothing and you could access the same catalogues from one app to the next (there are obscure asterisks but for 80-90% of people it's not a bother). On the other hand, studios are still deep in denial about that simple fact and have tried to slice-and-dice access to movies, which as you might have seen led to the revival of movie piracy.

To simplify, for music you just choose if you want the additional services offered by Spotify or Apple and not focusing on what catalogue it has (barring some obscure asterisks), while this is the polar opposite has happened on music industry and now you are either actively researching where goes what or just gave up and pirate. As Gabe Newell has said, give the consumers a better service and they'll use it. Record companies succumbed and quietly accept this, studios don't (and I'll wager that they will eventually accept to have a single service).

[CharlesW]

> I didn't do any actual head-to-head comparisons, but movies that come out on services like Paramount+ also tend to get a simultaneous release on BitTorrent trackers…

When you say "released", do you mean they're pirated almost immediately? Or is there now a legit way to get non-pirated content that I'm not aware of?

[DasDing]

Yes, it's satire.

[pornel]

The EME spec is a useless junk. It describes a fictional architecture that no browser has implemented. It's not possible to use it for any actual DRM implementation — if it was, it wouldn't be DRM! The authors of the spec are on the record saying they would never use the implementation described in the spec.

The real specs that all the browsers and media vendors used for DRM are vendor-specific closely guarded secrets, as they have always been.

The only purpose the spec ever had was laundering DRM with W3C's reputation.

[charcircuit]

???

Pretty much all streaming companies of DRM protected content use EME with Widevine as the CDM. How is it useless if everyone is using it?

[pornel]

Because it's not relying on the EME spec. If you want to use Widevine, you have to sign an NDA with Google and use their proprietary spec for it. Exactly like you'd have if EME did not exist.

The EME spec only documents how to use a "Clear Key" scheme that is a complete trash defeated in 1 line of code, and of course not allowed by any website with DRM.

The EME spec says nothing about Widevine or any real-world DRM API. The CDM side, that does 99.99% of the actual work, is not documented in the EME spec. It's only a hypothetical construct alluded to in the spec, but not an actual API. The actual browser implementations don't even use the architecture outlined in the EME spec. Almost all of the EME spec is non-normative, or for the decoy Clear Key non-DRM.

EME is like a spec that says Adobe Flash is <object type="application/vnd.adobe.flash" />. There, Adobe Flash is now an open web standard. You have everything you need to handle .swf files without plug-ins, except the content playback module, which is a detail left for each vendor to figure out.

[peaBerberian]

I get what you're saying about the implementation of the CDM internals not being documented, but to me - a MSE/EME player developer - it seems that the main chunk of the Encrypted Media Extension API does also apply when Widevine, PlayReady and so on are used.

The user-agent is still relying on the same interfaces and concepts (MediaKeySession, key id, same events, same methods, same way to persist licenses) and the application generally can work transparently without doing exceptions for each key system (well, in reality, there are a lot of compatibility bugs in a lot ot EME implementations, but those are not on purpose).

For example the server certificate concept generally does not apply to clear key implementations at all but is frequently used when using Widevine.

Clearkey is thoroughly documented because that is the only key system that SHOULD be implemented in all user agents with an EME implementation, though nobody, even the writers of that specification, think that it is a good idea for real production usage.

In my work we rely a lot on the EME specification, and refered to it many times in exchanges with our partners when we thought that their CDM implementations (e.g. on specific set-top boxes, smart tvs, game consoles etc.) lead to non-compliance to that spec (e.g. unusable keys not being properly announced etc.).

_PS: off-topic but I came across your projects and comments online many times, IIRC mostly about image encoders / decoders and on Rust (both subjects on which I love to read). That was always very interesting, thanks!_