Google's Widevine L3 DRM Cracked

Thaldor · January 5, 2019

30 minutes ago, Commodus said:

The point is that you're not really 'stuck' like you implied. If you can afford to download an episode or a season of a show, you're probably not so tightly metered that you have to choose between downloading that show again and listening to Spotify that month.

When you put it like that you acctually miss the whole point why those offline features are there in the first place. Quite many save a big buck by having cheap mobile plan if they live in a appartment that offers cheap high-speed network (like I pay 10€/month for 100Mbps unlimited cable and could probably easily drop my phone plan to 5€/month with something like 10Mbps with 2GB limit instead of paying 20€/month for 100Mbps unlimited mobile plan) and download their playlists and series for the go. Problems arise when you have something like 8h bus trip ahead of you and you know that most of your devices will be drained after it completely and you can spen that whole time watching a series if you just download it to a thumbdrive and swap it to the devices (downloading the whole series to all of the devices is quite dumb).

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The thing is, you can't really ignore the practical reality of what content producers want. They're not going to have that epiphany any time soon, if ever. So, you can accept that DRM is here to stay, or you can keep hoping that they'll remove it and make a small number of viewers happy at the expense of everyone else.

On offline downloads... er, do you live in reality? If Netflix removes DRM, there's zero reason for many people to stay subscribed. The one person who keeps up a subscription downloads all the shows and shares them with their 29 closest friends. And no, that doesn't mean Netflix's subscription model is bad -- the subscription is necessary so that Netflix actually has the money to make those originals and license other shows.

I know Netflix content is "all over!" Hence "easier." It's the difference between having to go a pirate site and understand the concept of a torrent versus just asking your friend to send things through cloud storage or a thumb drive. There are plenty of places where piracy still thrives on physical or friend-to-friend exchanges. DRM doesn't stop determined piracy, but it does prevent casual piracy.

DRM in all cases just fucks the paying customers. Like now probably quite many content providers are calling and negotiating Netflix to drop the Android support just because the DRM got cracked and all it would do is fuck the paying customers who use Android devices. Pirates didn't care in the first place and they don't care in the last place just because DRM has never been anything else than a bandaid over open fracture, especially with video and audio because they are so easy to rip from the output.

Funny thing about money is also that developing and licensing DRMs also burns money and what they get for it? Basicly nothing, even the strongest DRMs just wither away at the moment the video or sound is played, it might take some "special" devices at some point but probably at that point the DRM has gone so far that it becomes as ridiculous as music CD DRM was in the early 2000's and the backslash for record companies was that bad they removed the DRM, meaning it fucked so many paying customers that they got angry, even the artists got angry because they were on the line of fire.

Only instances really pushing for the DRM are the content providers because, let's be real here, they mostly are fossils that try to still hang on to the old marketing and sales strategies. The thing that really pushed people to pirate was those unskipable ads and warnings about piratism and all the hassle with VHSs, DVDs and general physical media. Netflix managed to change that, works everywhere, works always, no hassle, no needed shelfspace and affordable, only real threat for it is the content providers who don't want to understand the modern technology and it's limitations. Like if Google doesn't manage to plug this fast enough the reality could be that the content providers force Netflix to pull the plug for Android support, at least for higher definition content, and we return to the "Netflix is shit because 4K content is only available for Windows 10 running on the most recent Intel CPUs"-moment in time and once again the paying customers were fucked up, pirates would still be just as happy enjoying their 4K HDR content from their Android devices, maybe even happier because another shitstorm surrounding DRM.