Re: Campaign for position of chair and mandate to close this community group

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 8:34 AM, David Wood <david@3roundstones.com> wrote:

> Hi Mark,
>
> On Jan 13, 2014, at 11:07, Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com> wrote:
>
> I believe I've explained quite a few times why confining restricted
> content to native apps / plugins (the solution we have today) is a problem.
> And it's purely a technological / user experience one, not a political one.
>
> For our specific usecase, today's solution:
> - requires users to go through an install step to access content on the web
> - supports only software decoding, which impacts both video quality (on
> constrained devices) and battery life
> - is tied to a specific vendor (Microsoft). This is an issue both for the
> provider and the user - it would also be better if users had a choice of
> player technologies.
> - that vendor has announced end-of-life for that solution
>
>
> I accept that what you say is true and is not, in and of itself, some form
> of evil.
>
> However, why not rely upon a (possibly proprietary) native browser plug-in
> that would provide access to the GPU for hardware decoding?
>

Assuming you mean plugin in the sense of something we write and distribute
and that is integrated through <object>:

- This requires an install step, which is something we would like to avoid
- Browsers don't today expose a plugin API that enables full integration
with the HTML Media Element and we'd like to be able to use the great HTML5
capabilities being developed in browsers
- Such a plugin would duplicate a lot of browser / platform-specific
integration work that is already being done by browser implementors
- We think browser implementors are better gatekeepers for this
functionality from a security and privacy perspective than service
providers and that users' choice of browser should matter in this respect
(rather than the user being required to install the same plugin,
independent of their choice of browser).

It is not clear to me why there is a significant distinction (in respect of
the other issues in this thread) between "native browser plugin" and "CDM".


>
> Secondly, could you please clarify for the list whether Netflix considers
> it within its business model to produce a player? Why or why not?
>

We make Netflix player applications for many devices / platforms: TVs,
phones, tablets, game consoles, set-top-boxes even a native Windows app.
However, a significant amount of use of our service is through desktop web
browsers and we would like to make that experience as good as possible.

...Mark



>
> Regards,
> Dave
> --
> http://about.me/david_wood
>
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