[azakai]

> * Cool device? Now you need to convince (read pay) Adobe or Microsoft to port Flash/Silverlight to it or develop a native app and make it non-horrible e.g. for Netflix users to find and use.

This is still true with EME. EME is just an API, you still need the closed-source proprietary DRM module itself, the CDM. You would need to convince/pay one of the very short list of such modules to port it to your device, and you would need to do so with a module that the content creators support.

The same is true for the other things in that list. EME simply does not even try to solve those problems - it just provides a standard HTML5 API to what remains a closed-source proprietary DRM module. There are very few companies with such modules - Adobe, Microsoft, and Google are the prominent ones. Without partnering with at least one of those, you can't bring DRM'd content using EME to a new device.

[acdha]

The difference is that you're talking about something which is MUCH smaller: someone can port the CDM to a new platform in far less time than it'd take for a complex platform like Flash or Silverlight because all you're dealing with is the DRM, not things like networking, display, sound, hardware accelerated video decoding, OpenGL, etc. Both Flash and Silverlight are to a first approximation as complicated at the entire web stack and almost none of that functionality is needed for a simple video player.

Yes, it sucks that it's proprietary but since consumers don't show any sign of refusing to buy DRMed content it makes sense to restrict the footprint as much as possible rather than letting the requirement for DRM drive your entire platform.