let's address the elephant in the room.
Google got the authority from everyone here who accepted chrome and IE DRM by default, to the point that even Firefox was forced to give in, so you all could be sedated by Netflix and other DRMed content.
Google got the authority from everyone here who accepted chrome and IE DRM by default, to the point that even Firefox was forced to give in, so you all could be sedated by Netflix and other DRMed content.
For basically all the users, this works great; demand for a new browser is low, for streaming media pretty high.
I work in this space and I think the EME path has been a fairly elegant solution for a lot of what was preventing us from being able to use HTML5 video, including DRM but also live streaming and its ilk with HLS/Dash and being able to quickly implement new codecs and transports. Having to fall back to a flash player was never ideal.
If you want to make an argument that DRM is bad, or, maybe more relevant, ineffective I'm not sure I'd argue with you. However I think the solution we have in place has made the video ecosystem in the browser better and did it quickly.
The issue here is about commercial use of a product and while we can blame Google as the owners of Widevine this really doesn't have anything to do with Chrome - outside of the fact that the author was able to quickly create his own browser based on open source components upon which Chrome was based.
Flash had/has to die!
Do you really, REALLY think that the very small number of people who are ever AWARE of this issue were enough to make a dent in it? So we could be sedated by Netflix? This attitude is intolerable and more harmful to the community of people who want a free web as using Chrome and watching Netflix is.
"Firefox downloads and enables the Google Widevine CDM by default to give users a smooth experience on sites that require DRM."
If you walked into some of these offices and suggested making things more open, they would laugh in your face. They equate free and open software with making their IP free as in beer, and since they lost billions in revenue when the P2P sharing sites first popped up they have no interest in working to make anything easier for the smaller guys.