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449 points bertman | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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alufers ◴[] No.29703989[source]
Can we just stop the shitshow with DRM? I have NEVER encountered a TV show/movie that I could't rip using a torrent either on public p2p sites or a private tracker.

But I have seen a lot of my non-technical friends and family having a degraded experience, who pay for their streaming services every month. It was either because they were using a browser or device which was deemed unworthy of full quality streaming by the mighty DRM authors. And now the poor users of the TB-X505X will also have a degraded experience.

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kybernetikos ◴[] No.29706045[source]
Recently tried to play a streaming service film on a second screen from my phone, but it wasn't allowed. This makes no sense given that I can do it from my PC in the browser client. But then the PC isn't allowed to download video from the streaming service for offline viewing, while the mobile client is. When I travel, I'm often not allowed to view shows that I watch in my home country on the streaming service, even though I'm using my own account on the same machine.

On top of all that, I worry that at some point one of the major services will arbitrarily cut off my access and any media I've 'purchased' will be lost. In the old days, your household insurance would pay to replace DVDs stolen or lost to a fire. I doubt that household insurance these days covers loss of access to google or amazon prime video, but the monetary value of these libraries could be enormous.

It's all stupid. The big media companies killed the companies offering 'dvd locker' type streaming services, where you legitimately bought and owned the DVDs, but the company allowed you to stream them over the internet. That would have been a nice way of doing it.

I find our descent into a culture where nobody owns anything but everything costs as much or more for temporary access as it did for ownership disappointing. Even people whose ideology praises property rights above almost all else don't seem to mind that they actually have those rights in fewer and fewer things of consequence.

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1. fomine3 ◴[] No.29709205[source]
> This makes no sense given that I can do it from my PC in the browser client.

> But then the PC isn't allowed to download video from the streaming service for offline viewing, while the mobile client is.

I believe that's why the restriction exists.

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2. kybernetikos ◴[] No.29723185[source]
Whatever the reason it results in a bad disjointed experience for the user.

Besides I can't work out a way that the restriction makes sense. The app knows that I'm streaming this film not playing it from download, so restricting what I can do based on the fact that I could have downloaded it but didn't would be really weird.

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3. fomine3 ◴[] No.29723699[source]
If the app supports offline playing, you can download on multiple devices and set offline, then you can play videos in multiple devices than service/content provider want to allow (though offline playback would expire within dozens of days). So they want to enforce max devices limit only for app. Whether the limitation meaningful for abuse is different story.