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

On Mar 2, 2012, at 12:18 PM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:

> On 3/2/12 3:11 PM, Mark Watson wrote:
>> That you can use the service on any device that supports it and not on others is also obvious (even tautological).
> 
> Why?  It's not obvious to me, and seems broken at first glance.  Why shouldn't any device be able to support any service, a priori?

You can't play Netflix on a toaster, even an IP-enabled one ;-)

But seriously, I was referring to common customer expectations. When a customer chooses between a new TV with a Netflix badge and one without they don't expect to be able to watch Netflix on the one without the badge.

I was contrasting this with the expectation of a customer who buys an mp3 recording of a song, who experiences some frustration if this does not play on all the 'mp3 players' that they own.

My point was just to illustrate that content protection as used by streaming services like Netflix does not impact customers in the same way as it does on download-with-license services.  

> 
>> However, these are product differences, not a question of good and bad technology. We don't use committees to decide which products are good and which are bad.
> 
> People try to use committees all the time to influence which products are viable in the market and which are not.
> 
> That's precisely my concern in this situation: that the de-facto outcome of this specification would be the creation of anticompetitive barriers enforced by reference to the specification....

I agree there's a problem to be solved here. I certainly don't want to see a situation where a given OS/browser combination looses access to services as those services move from plugins to HTML5. I don't think we can ensure that by writing specifications alone.

> 
> I'd love to be wrong about that.

I hope you will be. I'm more than happy to work on making that so.

...Mark

> 
> -Boris
> 
>

Received on Friday, 2 March 2012 22:15:21 UTC