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

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 09:17, Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com> wrote:

>
> 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.
>

Well written, Mark.

Wanted to highlight a slightly different angle of a point that Glenn made
earlier in the thread:

It's indeed not easy to switch between content protection systems today
because they tend to be entangled with content formats and UI frameworks,
and content distributors have had to make big investments in these.

The proposal, specifically its inherent support for common encryption,
would get us to a world where switching CDMs (or supporting multiple CDMs)
becomes much easier for content distributors - the content format doesn't
change, the user-facing application doesn't change.
So new CDMs with properties that are an improvement for the user and/or the
content distributor can now evolve.

Christian