No, but media can be watermarked in imperceptible ways, and then if all players are required to check and act on such watermarks, the gap becomes narrow enough to probably be effective.
See Cinavia.
No, but media can be watermarked in imperceptible ways, and then if all players are required to check and act on such watermarks, the gap becomes narrow enough to probably be effective.
See Cinavia.
Massive if. Why would I voluntarily purchase gimped hardware?
Cinavia depended on being implemented by the player itself. It's difficult to see how (for example) a smart tv could implement it for streams coming in via HDMI from a computer the user has full control of.
But wait! Even that's not good enough because my (now illicit) pirate box can present the stream embedded in a webpage for the locked down device that I don't control to play back on the DRM'd TV. So I guess now we're also going to want a scheme to prevent government approved devices from establishing network connections with unapproved ones?
Keep in mind that distributors absolutely do not want to reencode video per client at the edge. IIUC they go a long way out of their way to avoid ever having to do that, with the current watermarking scheme working by randomly selecting chunks to send from two or more pre-encoded video streams.
Meanwhile AI appears poised to give us unlimited approximately free (plus a few kW hours) entertainment at least assuming it doesn't end up somehow killing us all.
The only thing this scheme was ever going to catch was full blown counterfeit disks sold on a street corner to your average joe. I think that was only ever much of a thing in the developing world. Or was it just before my time?
I'm aware of what Netflix and other streaming services do. That actually makes sense.