I wonder how much they are saying "this is a small and thus irrelevant user base", and how much they are saying "this is a dangerous user base". Linux support manages to get them the sort of user who is least concerned with intellectual property laws and most likely to have the technical skill to work around their DRM mechanisms.
But it is already on Chrome OS. It is certainly not ideal to limit it to one browser, but at least it would get it to linux users faster and they can improve from there.
Without knowing more about the details, we can't assume that it's so simple.
It might be that there is other software beyond Chrome itself that Netflix relies on in Chromebooks, and that software may or may not play nice with arbitrary distributions.
Example wild speculation: Netflix for the Chromebooks relies on a kernel extension for DRM, and they know they wouldn't be able to get the desktop Linux community at large to swallow that pill.
Netflix is available on several Linux devices (Chromebook, Android, Roku, Linux-based TVs, etc.) but these devices usually have some hardware-based DRM features available. There are no standards for DRM on the Linux desktop and we certainly don't have any hardware support for DRM so I don't see this ever coming to fruition.
> most likely to have the technical skill to work around their DRM mechanisms.
Which would be a preposterous thing to worry about. Why worry about breaking the DRM on crappy Netflix streams when you can either record straight from TV (and thus distribute brand new shows 15 minutes after they air) or rip straight from DVD/Blu-ray (and thus have a considerable quality advantage over Netflix)? Apart from the very small amount of Netflix-exclusive content (which hasn't been very notable, which granted will change with Arrested Development), the Netflix DRM does absolutely nothing except make customers worry about what devices are compatible.
"Linux support manages to get them the sort of user who is least concerned with intellectual property laws"
How so? In my personal experience it's Windows users who pirate the most software by far. Linux users choose an OS with far fewer commercial desktop apps and generally make do with open-source applications. Linux users have also been shown to pay more for indie games and apps and have been vocal in wanting Steam on Linux so they can throw money at Valve. Given how easy it is to rile up many Linux users with accusations of GPL infringement, I'd say that they generally understand and care more about IP laws than the average Windows user.
1. Is that someone demanded this from the distribution company. We know the MPAA, RIAA, etc can make odd decisions about this sorta thing
2. They can't find the engineers. They struggled for the Android engineers and had (still do?) have open positions for it. That's how we knew Netflix was coming to Android long before anything was seen. They had job postings for Android video experts.
That is a horrible phrasing of a question. Talk about inflammatory!
Anyway, to answer your question, it has nothing to do with desktop linux but rather hardware. Chromebook, most Android devices, Roku etc typically have hardware DRM enabled that allows Netflix to run on the device.
i dont understand how you cannot emulate a hardware DRM module via software. How can the netflix app tell if the machine its running on has a legit DRM module, or an emulated one?
Correct. :) I have no tears to shed for this problem. Netflix in 2010:
"Setting aside the debate around the value of content protection and DRM, they are requirements we must fulfill in order to obtain content from major studios for our subscribers to enjoy."
If Netflix was that important to desktop linux users, the distros would have coaxed a Silverlight implementation from MS or worked on the HAL-Flash schism or done SOMETHING to enable video streaming services to do their legal duty to their content providers. They didn't, no Netflix for you. Hardware DRM assistance is helpful, but clearly not required.
I really don't understand why they are choosing to do this, it just seems like they are choosing to arbitrarily limit a set of their users. I'd even be willing to accept that I had to use Chrome and it was an app in the Chrome store (since they have a Chromebook version)
What's the risk? There's nothing on Netflix that isn't already on The Pirate Bay.
Wouldn't surprise me if it was a contractual obligation from Microsoft. In the past they were extremely aggressive in offering incentives and juicy licence terms for companies that would help push Silverlight.
Hulu and Amazon stream using flash only, over largely reverse-engineerable protocols. See, for example, the XBMC plugins for those services which work quite well. Now neither Hulu nor Amazon have the depth of content availability that Netflix does, but they're clearly not shackled by DRM handcuffs either.
I don't know about that. I've tried reversing Hulu's player to access their *.flv files, but they appear to do some sort of handshake that is uniquely generated for each user session and hashed.
It may not be easy, but it's been done. Check out the source to the bluecop Hulu plugin for XBMC if you're curious. All the content goes over conventional streams. There's no deeply-integrated "DRM" layer, just stuff you can do from flash.
This doesn't surprise me, but just seems like an obviously flawed way to prevent piracy.
If you want to prevent your movie from appearing on the pirate bay in a DRM free format you have to make it so that nobody in the entire world is capable of recording the stream.
Even if you make sure the stream remains encrypted all the way from the server to the monitor, at some point it has to be decrypted in order to play. You only need one guy with the skills to take his monitor apart and modify it to feed the input into the actual OLEDs into another device. Once that happens it's game over.
The only way to really win would be prevent consumer playback devices from actually playing DRM Free content at all and insist that all content is signed. In essence force every consumer who wants to pirate to make a hardware modification.
That last bit has well-accepted precedent: Game consoles. They do exactly that. Ever since the NES, game consoles have been designed not to play open content but to verify some sort of signature (not necessarily cryptographic, could be in the physical media like the NES's lockout chip.) Pirating on a game console has always required modification; a hardware modchip for older consoles or a software jailbreaking exploit for newer ones with an operating system. But the market accepted that just fine. Such a restriction doesn't perfectly prevent piracy, but is broadly effective.
Yet, the piracy market for consoles are so large that dedicated pheripheral sellers (these mod chip sellers) can exist.
This just points to the fact that software is notoriously difficult to keep safe via DRM, and that people _want_ the content, just not at the price point that large publishers are selling at, and people _think_ that the price point should be lower.
The amount of piracy of console games is minuscule compared to piracy of movies , MP3s and PC games. If you force people to jailbreak or hardware mod their equipment it drops the rate dramatically.
The issue is that the lower price point in the case of piracy appears to be free. People still pirate $1 iphone apps.
> If you force people to jailbreak or hardware mod their equipment it drops the rate dramatically.
this is a very key quote - it indeed drops the rate of piracy. But does it increase the profits earned correspondingly? that is, did the anti-piracy measures contribute positively to profit?
I am unsure what the case is in reality, since its so hard to compare. Most pirate's intuition is that anti-piracy measures don't increase the profits (or unit sold, so as not to complicate currency+accounting issues). Companies that use anti-piracy measures seem to think the exact opposite.
I've always assumed studio contracts were the reason. Surely most if not all engineers at Netflix would love to support Linux. They have released some very cool Open Source projects like Eureka and regularly post details about the inner workings of their AWS infrastructure on the tech blog.
It is most likely the result of a person from the distribution company saying, "Hey, either you give us this or we're not licensing the movie to your for online use. Period."
The UK equivalent of Netflix called "Lovefilm" also moved from working fine under Linux (via Flash) to requiring Silverlight and of course moonlight doesn't work.
Their reasoning was that Silverlight had better DRM so people couldn't rip the films. However they also offered a DVD rental service , so you could get any of the streamable films (plus a load more) delivered through the post at which point it would be trivial to rip them.
I haven't looked but I'm pretty sure all of the films they offered for streaming are available as torrents too and probably at much higher quality.
Really? In my experience, while ripping videos from the web is easy, ripping flash streams is a huge pain. Where a DVD just needs easily available software and hitting go.
If you know a good way of ripping streams please tell me, wrangling Orbit's invasive and buggy plugin was the only thing that worked to grab RTMP the last time I tried.
The whole concept of "supporting Linux" is odd. Linux is a kernel. As a Mac user I don't go around asking if people support XNU.
A company like Netflix has to target relatively consistent environments -- operating systems -- so a much more honest question would be to ask if Netflix will support Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Mint, etc. In that case, the question is its own answer ("no, none of those are big enough"). Diversity can be a weakness just as it can be a strength.
Technically true, but when people say "Linux" they usually mean "GNU/Linux" and usually in the context of a desktop or server.
Once you support one distro you are essentially supporting them all, even if not officially. Even though Ubuntu is going in it's own direction with Unity etc pretty much all of the base libs are the same.
I could understand if they said "Yes, we support Ubuntu 12.04 only" in which case that would basically mean "you can probably get it to work on any distro under the sun but don't call us about it".
Linux is a kernel, with a bunch of distros built on top of it, with a large degree of compatibility between them. There have been various efforts at standardization, with various degrees of success; it's not perfect, but getting something to work on, say, Fedora and Ubuntu is a much smaller task than getting something to work on Windows and Mac, and if something works on one distro it's usually possible to get it to run on your distro of choice with some finagling.
Here's another theory - maybe it just doesn't make sense financially.
A source-only netflix wouldn't fly. So, they would need to get developers, packagers, QA, and support for either one or multiple distributions and many different hardware configurations, not to mention dealing with linux's plethora of audio subsystems and graphics driver issues.
It's possible to test on every ChromeOS device. It's much more expensive to QA and support every linux desktop configuration. Perhaps it's just not worth it because there are so few desktop linux users. The expected income would need to be much more than paying for linux devs/packagers/QA/support before it is a good business move.
How many linux users don't have a box (ps3, wii, etc, etc) that DOES have Netflix on it and is conveniently already connected to a TV? Netflix's lack of Linux support, and choice of Silverlight, has always confused me but personally it's everywhere else I actually want it anyways.
Old joke, "Netflix works GREAT on Linux, get a Roku box."
So "Netflix on Linux" is really 'NetFlix on a Linux running on a Laptop.' But here is the reality, if you make a list ordered by how many people would benefit of things you could put a Netflix client on, "Linux based laptops" would be nearly the bottom of the list, right above the Chumby. But if you made a list of "things we could do to irritate skittish big-content types" putting out a Netflix client on a Linux based system would be at near top of the list. That is a killer combination that I doubt will be dealt with soon.
The irony here is that if Netflix supported linux, it would likely be via Ubuntu only, and then a bunch of linux users with their own favorite blend of Linux would freak out and it would turn into a potential PR nightmare because Netflix "isn't open enough" and RMS or others would talk about how evil Netfix is for not supporting DRM free truly open technologies and so on and so forth.
Also, the people who want Netflix for Linux already can get it on iOS, Android Xbox 360, PS3, Roku, Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, Apple TV, and on and on and on, so how many more Netflix subscribers are going to join that haven't already? Is that going to be enough money to offset the extra support costs as well as the likely PR nightmare described above?
The irony is that Netflix has depended upon the "Linux ecosystem" for its technical existence.
They're better than some, but spend a few years in real "corporate" environments, and you'll experience first hand a surfeit of such "taking, not giving" attitudes.
If Netflix is merely the middleman, I nonetheless increasingly am coming to view them as an enabler of some very selfish people, people inhibiting and destructing our society in the pursuit of their own self-interests.
How difficult would it be to build out an Android instance with only Netflix installed? Then you could deploy the instance locally whenever needed... Or from a business point of view - get an ARM array of servers that can run it. Then have them launch on demand with user info, and allow people to "remote in" ?
"I do feel this goes to show why Netflix is taking a continued hit on their stock price and subscriber base, simply put they lack innovation and are not catering to major niches such as Linux Users."
Funny, I thought the stock price taking a dive was because of the Qwikster fiasco. And I thought the falling subscriber base was because of the separation of streaming and DVD plans paired with a lack of good content that is available to be streamed.
59 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadIt might be that there is other software beyond Chrome itself that Netflix relies on in Chromebooks, and that software may or may not play nice with arbitrary distributions.
Example wild speculation: Netflix for the Chromebooks relies on a kernel extension for DRM, and they know they wouldn't be able to get the desktop Linux community at large to swallow that pill.
Which would be a preposterous thing to worry about. Why worry about breaking the DRM on crappy Netflix streams when you can either record straight from TV (and thus distribute brand new shows 15 minutes after they air) or rip straight from DVD/Blu-ray (and thus have a considerable quality advantage over Netflix)? Apart from the very small amount of Netflix-exclusive content (which hasn't been very notable, which granted will change with Arrested Development), the Netflix DRM does absolutely nothing except make customers worry about what devices are compatible.
How so? In my personal experience it's Windows users who pirate the most software by far. Linux users choose an OS with far fewer commercial desktop apps and generally make do with open-source applications. Linux users have also been shown to pay more for indie games and apps and have been vocal in wanting Steam on Linux so they can throw money at Valve. Given how easy it is to rile up many Linux users with accusations of GPL infringement, I'd say that they generally understand and care more about IP laws than the average Windows user.
1. Is that someone demanded this from the distribution company. We know the MPAA, RIAA, etc can make odd decisions about this sorta thing 2. They can't find the engineers. They struggled for the Android engineers and had (still do?) have open positions for it. That's how we knew Netflix was coming to Android long before anything was seen. They had job postings for Android video experts.
Anyway, to answer your question, it has nothing to do with desktop linux but rather hardware. Chromebook, most Android devices, Roku etc typically have hardware DRM enabled that allows Netflix to run on the device.
"Setting aside the debate around the value of content protection and DRM, they are requirements we must fulfill in order to obtain content from major studios for our subscribers to enjoy."
If Netflix was that important to desktop linux users, the distros would have coaxed a Silverlight implementation from MS or worked on the HAL-Flash schism or done SOMETHING to enable video streaming services to do their legal duty to their content providers. They didn't, no Netflix for you. Hardware DRM assistance is helpful, but clearly not required.
Wouldn't surprise me if it was a contractual obligation from Microsoft. In the past they were extremely aggressive in offering incentives and juicy licence terms for companies that would help push Silverlight.
I don't know what juicy license terms would be , considering I can stick a flash or HTML5 video on my website without paying adobe or W3C a cent.
If you want to prevent your movie from appearing on the pirate bay in a DRM free format you have to make it so that nobody in the entire world is capable of recording the stream.
Even if you make sure the stream remains encrypted all the way from the server to the monitor, at some point it has to be decrypted in order to play. You only need one guy with the skills to take his monitor apart and modify it to feed the input into the actual OLEDs into another device. Once that happens it's game over.
The only way to really win would be prevent consumer playback devices from actually playing DRM Free content at all and insist that all content is signed. In essence force every consumer who wants to pirate to make a hardware modification.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
This just points to the fact that software is notoriously difficult to keep safe via DRM, and that people _want_ the content, just not at the price point that large publishers are selling at, and people _think_ that the price point should be lower.
The issue is that the lower price point in the case of piracy appears to be free. People still pirate $1 iphone apps.
this is a very key quote - it indeed drops the rate of piracy. But does it increase the profits earned correspondingly? that is, did the anti-piracy measures contribute positively to profit?
I am unsure what the case is in reality, since its so hard to compare. Most pirate's intuition is that anti-piracy measures don't increase the profits (or unit sold, so as not to complicate currency+accounting issues). Companies that use anti-piracy measures seem to think the exact opposite.
Their reasoning was that Silverlight had better DRM so people couldn't rip the films. However they also offered a DVD rental service , so you could get any of the streamable films (plus a load more) delivered through the post at which point it would be trivial to rip them.
I haven't looked but I'm pretty sure all of the films they offered for streaming are available as torrents too and probably at much higher quality.
Quibbling here, physically ripping a DVD is much less trivial than simply recording a stream.
If you know a good way of ripping streams please tell me, wrangling Orbit's invasive and buggy plugin was the only thing that worked to grab RTMP the last time I tried.
A company like Netflix has to target relatively consistent environments -- operating systems -- so a much more honest question would be to ask if Netflix will support Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Mint, etc. In that case, the question is its own answer ("no, none of those are big enough"). Diversity can be a weakness just as it can be a strength.
Once you support one distro you are essentially supporting them all, even if not officially. Even though Ubuntu is going in it's own direction with Unity etc pretty much all of the base libs are the same.
I could understand if they said "Yes, we support Ubuntu 12.04 only" in which case that would basically mean "you can probably get it to work on any distro under the sun but don't call us about it".
A source-only netflix wouldn't fly. So, they would need to get developers, packagers, QA, and support for either one or multiple distributions and many different hardware configurations, not to mention dealing with linux's plethora of audio subsystems and graphics driver issues.
It's possible to test on every ChromeOS device. It's much more expensive to QA and support every linux desktop configuration. Perhaps it's just not worth it because there are so few desktop linux users. The expected income would need to be much more than paying for linux devs/packagers/QA/support before it is a good business move.
Old joke, "Netflix works GREAT on Linux, get a Roku box."
So "Netflix on Linux" is really 'NetFlix on a Linux running on a Laptop.' But here is the reality, if you make a list ordered by how many people would benefit of things you could put a Netflix client on, "Linux based laptops" would be nearly the bottom of the list, right above the Chumby. But if you made a list of "things we could do to irritate skittish big-content types" putting out a Netflix client on a Linux based system would be at near top of the list. That is a killer combination that I doubt will be dealt with soon.
Also, the people who want Netflix for Linux already can get it on iOS, Android Xbox 360, PS3, Roku, Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, Apple TV, and on and on and on, so how many more Netflix subscribers are going to join that haven't already? Is that going to be enough money to offset the extra support costs as well as the likely PR nightmare described above?
If it works on Ubuntu it can probably be ported easy enough. However maybe they are worried about getting support calls from people running Fluxbox?
They're better than some, but spend a few years in real "corporate" environments, and you'll experience first hand a surfeit of such "taking, not giving" attitudes.
If Netflix is merely the middleman, I nonetheless increasingly am coming to view them as an enabler of some very selfish people, people inhibiting and destructing our society in the pursuit of their own self-interests.
Funny, I thought the stock price taking a dive was because of the Qwikster fiasco. And I thought the falling subscriber base was because of the separation of streaming and DVD plans paired with a lack of good content that is available to be streamed.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/104957/is-it-possible-to-inst...
However, it may be the case that the display ends up being quite small.