[Bug 27053] Platform Segmentation

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=27053

--- Comment #6 from Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com> ---
(In reply to Sergey Konstantinov from comment #4)
> No, I'm not.

Could you answer my supplemental questions, then : Are there specific aspects
of the current design which you think do preclude these outcomes and so should
be changed ? What are they ?

> 
> DRM systems have non-web history long enough to make some certain
> conclusions. As far as I know delivering some content exclusively to
> particular platform or group of users is considered as a normal business
> practice; so I'm quite sure that sooner or later this practice will expand
> into the Web unless we take some precautions.

That practice has been present on the web since NPAPI plugins were introduced.
Typically, robustness is evaluated on a platform / DRM client combination and
thus there is typically per platform work to be done on the DRM client
solution. As a result, not all platforms get support.

With EME we are trying to improve this situation. Indeed, Netflix at least now
works on popular flavors of Linux, for example.

The EME specification does nothing to preclude further expansion of the
supported platforms. If there is more we could do in our specification to
encourage further expansion, I'd like to know.

> One obvious possibility is
> just making it impossible to segment platform — by developing open
> standards, protocols, license formats, etc. On this way I see no *technical*
> obstacles, just political ones.

Is your proposal that we expand the scope of the EME work to fully define a new
DRM solution in a fully platform-independent way ?

I would see that rather as a completely new work item. It would need to address
many aspects which are not typically seen as in-scope in W3C, but I've said
consistently that I at least would welcome realistic proposals.

There *are* technical barriers to such a thing, not least robustness.

There are also business barriers (IPR) and legal barriers (FOSS license terms).

I actually don't see any political barriers. It's not that people don't want
such a thing for some nefarious political reason, but that the barriers above
seem insurmountable.

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Received on Thursday, 23 October 2014 14:57:57 UTC