Google Is Deprecating the Widevine DRM CDM

... no, it isn't.

To be precise, Google is deprecating previous software components of Widevine, which will be updated later this month [1] and which happens regularly regardless of DRM brand (PlayReady updates monthly for example), but other than that it's a nothingburger.

1: Listed here on Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1795749 (and yes it's ironic that it cannot be found on Monorail: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=4.10.2557...)

The headline could also be “Google is deprecating older Widevine CDM versions”, which is a regular process.

Whether or not the playback error rate of your product significantly spikes depends on the number of older non-Chrome browsers that are using Widevine. Probably mostly Firefox installations that don’t receive regular updates by their users. Chrome itself is doing pretty well with pushing updates for plugins such as the mentioned CDM.

Analytics tools will certainly help to determine how many users will be affected after December 6. Perhaps something for Bitmovin to provide a smart metric for exactly this.