DRM should have stayed second-class, leaving the way open for competitors to offer a first-class web experience as long as they left DRM behind.
Competitors already exist in this area. Here is GoG's listening of DRM-free movies: https://www.gog.com/movies?sort=bestselling&page=1
It is very rare that I find something I want to watch here, where as the content I generally want to watch, sadly, exists behind a DRM-wall.
Services/competitors are a dime a dozen, but the issue is driving users to your service, and I don't believe users will run to watch content they don't want to watch just because it is DRM free. I also don't feel like we will force content creators to go DRM free since, as we're seeing, everyone is releasing their own streaming service, which would include DRM.
Hollywood has no desire to enter an open platform. They're completely happy if none of their movies are online, ever. Really. They already have a massively profitable distribution system in the theaters.
The problem is that people want to watch Hollywood movies on their computer, including people that use Linux. So what do you tell those people to do? Tell them run Windows? Have them go watch it in the theater? And they have copyright controls that can force offline sites that host copyrighted content in various countries.
So DRM is the tech industry's way to kiss these people ass. It may be flawed or may not work, but it's still ass-kissing. They're the artists, they get to decide what they do with their art. The consumer has no right to an artists creation. Their only choice is to pay up or ignore it.
And you'll find that this happens to other art mediums as well. There are many, many art galleries that won't sell certain works of art if they deem your ownership as insufficient. Literally - the customer is wrong.
>We are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This video cassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright.
But hey if Hollywood wants to refund every purchase I made adjusting for inflation and with interest of VCRs, LaserDisc Players, DVD Players, BluRay players and all the titles I bought on them over and over then fine let's go back to you can only ever see a movie in a theatre.
Yes I realize DVD and BluRay have DRM but there was just as much wailing and gnashing of teeth over those media when introduced and each one was more profitable than the last and remain so even though their DRM is now broken. Contrast that with the failed DIVX platform and you can see what consumers want versus what Hollywood does are very much out of sync.
They can pirate it too, which is often a superior user experience in that the user can keep the file, move it to a different device, watch without arcane restrictions, etc.
Look at Netflix and others who are starting to build alternatives to that ecosystem (in addition to working with it for existing content). If DRM remained second-class, maybe the next such alternative would loosen its stranglehold a bit to gain a broader audience and reduce friction.