Re: Encrypted Media proposal: Summary of the discussion so far

On Mar 8, 2012, at 6:25 AM, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:

> I must ask, though, if the sponsors of this proposal truly believe that the outcome of this will be a royalty-free CDM that can be implemented on any platform, why bother with the intermediary steps?

I don't think we can expect this outcome with certainty. There are many rights holders in this space and it may not be in the power of content protection vendors to make the client part of their solution royalty-free in all cases.

What we can say with certainty, though, is that we will not get this outcome, or anything else that improves this aspect of support for commercial video services on the web, with the status quo.

The status quo is not a level playing field for browsers/platforms. Flash and SIlverlight are not supported on many platforms and this list is growing as more and more devices support HTML. So these devices are unable to access an important part of the web without custom apps.

The proposal enables a wide range of options for addressing this. I know people would like to have more clarity on exactly what those options look like. So would I. That is not a question of releasing some previously withheld information, but of developing the proposal and working with the various stakeholders to identify and study the options as the specification work progresses.

I do expect that there will be CDMs that anyone can easily license and port to their platform, I don't know if they will be always or sometimes free. I expect there will be CDM APIs that browsers can use to access platform-based CDMs on TVs, say. I expect browsers might support some kind of pluggable APIs for adding third-party CDMs. I expect there will be third-parties who are motivated to get CDMs onto those platforms. I expect people will come up with options I have not thought of.

But whilst I hope my speculations are interesting, they are only that. There are problems to be solved here and our proposal is intended to begin work on solving them.

...Mark

Received on Thursday, 8 March 2012 17:17:50 UTC