Re: Encrypted Media proposal (was RE: ISSUE-179: av_param - Chairs Solicit Alternate Proposals or Counter-Proposals)

On Mar 2, 2012, at 4:16 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Mar 2012, Mark Watson wrote:
>> 
>> Ok, what I meant was that customers should not expect to buy a TV that 
>> does not support Netflix, plug it into the Internet and *without any 
>> other device* access our service.
> 
> Why not?

Sorry if I'm not making myself clear. It's Friday. My point was an empirical one that customers *today* do not expect to be able to do this *today* and this is different from the mp3 case.

I would love for it to be the case in future that every TV you can buy supports Netflix. That is why we brought our proposal.

> 
> Customers do expect to buy an Internet device (phone, computer, TV, 
> tablet, refrigerator, etc), plug it into the Internet, and *without any 
> other device* access Bing, Facebook, GMail, Wikipedia, Twitter, Amazon, 
> LinkedIn, MSN, Yahoo!, WordPress, eBay, IMDB, Craiglist, Flickr, 
> Pinterest, Windows Live, YouTube, PayPal, Tumblr, the White House home 
> page, Blogger, Reddit, Slashdot, The New York Times, my home page, the 
> W3C's site, the Bank of America site, eHow, porn sites, Dictionary.com, 
> MySpace, LiveJournal, C|NET, The Guardian, Yelp, Digg, the Wall Street 
> Journal, the Supreme Court Web site, Orkut, HP, the Telegraph, 
> TripAdvisor, Citibank, Groupon, Expedia, Intuit, Forbes, iStockPhoto, 
> Samsung's home page, the LA Times, the Drudge Report, NewEgg, AllRecipes, 
> Verizon Wireless, the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation, 
> BeNaughty.com, Time, CafePress, The Onion, Techmeme, Duck Duck Go, Kiva, 
> Airbnb, Quora, McDonald's, Khan Academy, Open Yale Courses, MacRumors.com, 
> NetCraft, E*Trade, The Escapist Magazine, Picasa, Groklaw, Barnes and 
> Noble, Maddox's page, ArsTechnica, the Huffington Post, Business Insider, 
> Gizmodo, 37signals, Fragsworth's fractal canvas, Zeldman's blog, 
> truthout, BP's home page, the Obama reelection campaign Web site, GitHub, 
> Twit.tv, Politico, the Washington Post, ...
> 
> Why exactly would NetFlix be special?

Because we offer content not available at any of those sites. Content that is licensed differently from the content those sites offer.

Not just Netflix, any service that offers similar content.

> 
> The *entire point* of Web standards is that you *can* plug in any 
> arbitrary Internet device and get the entire Web. If you undermine that, 
> there's no point having a standard. Might as well stay with the plugins.

I completely agree. That's exactly why we propose the extensions we propose. So that we can get to a situation where any TV you can buy can support this content.

> 
> 
>> I was pointing out a qualitative difference from the expectation of a 
>> customer who buys an mp3 from vendor X and expects it work on any mp3 
>> player, whether or not the player contains any 'X-stuff'
> 
> The difference is that the customer thinks "the music industry finally 
> gets it" and "the movie industry still doesn't get it".

Again, authors have the right to license their works however they choose (within the law). Software authors and movie authors alike. You may not agree with all their choices but I hope you support their right to make those choices.

At Netflix we don't have customers telling us that we 'don't get it'. It's often argued that all customers want is easy, convenient, reasonably-priced and legal access to content and they become frustrated with industries that refuse to offer them that. But that is exactly what we are offering and what we want to make possible with HTML5.

...Mark

> 
> Just because they're used to being scammed doesn't make it ok to do it.
> 
> -- 
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>

Received on Saturday, 3 March 2012 00:49:27 UTC