[rayiner]

Or, people get to use the web however they want without rigid "open everything" extremism. Netflix is the best business model on the internet right now: you pay them $X a month, get great content, everyone gets paid. DRM makes that possible. I find it far preferable to the advertising/spyware-based monetization model, which seems to be the only other viable business model for content on the internet. The internet standards should be flexible enough to accommodate both and let consumers choose.

[greggman]

> DRM makes that possible

O'RLY? That seems like a big jump of logic there. It's just as possible that with zero DRM they'd still do fine given playing back a movie in Netflix is far nicer than searching for the movie on some ad-ridden virus infested download site and then waiting several minutes to hours for it to be available.

[rayiner]

So the content producers are in the clear, right up until someone comes up with a user-friendly interface for doing Netflix -> DVD rips.

The point of DRM isn't to make it impossible for some people to copy the content. It's to make it inconvenient for ordinary people to copy the content. That's what the big problem with Napster was (after all, people have been copying content on Usenet since the dawn of time).

[hugoc]

With the current scheme house of cards was outside netflix within a week (if not the same day) So content producers are already doomed, why saddle html5 with DRM and binary blobs?

[rayiner]

Well Netflix has less of an incentive for DRM on their own content, since they don't have any DVD/Blu-Ray sales to protect. But to the extent that unencrypted streams make it easier for unsophisticated users to rip DVDs from streams, it's a relevant consideration for the big media companies that offer content on Netflix.

In the long run, content producers will survive because the general purpose PC will be marginalized as a platform. The future is not people watching torrent-ed rips of movies on their laptops, it's people watching Netflix and similar services on their Apple TVs and iPads. At that point it doesn't matter if the content is encrypted or not, since it won't be convenient for your typical user to watch a ripped copy.

[dthunt]

You're quite the prognosticator.

I would argue that the content producers will survive in spite of the fact that they lose the battle to create an entirely hands off encrypted media path from the website to your viewing device.

They will survive because they make their content easy to buy. They will survive /well/ if they make their content easy to buy and to license.

[acuozzo]

> So the content producers are in the clear, right up until someone comes up with a user-friendly interface for doing Netflix -> DVD rips.

Such programs are already available and are quite user-friendly.