Liz Gannes, over on NewTeeVee, is reporting that Widevine, a company up here in Seattle, will announce a DRM solution for Flash Video. She and I chatted about it and I’m a little skeptical about this being even possible.
As I mentioned in the article, DRM on Flash Video seems to be something most partners want to see. I hate DRM, and we’re seeing the waning days of DRM for music, but the battle over video isn’t there yet. But because Flash Video is so ubiquitous on the web, a DRM solution that works well might make bigger partners happy.
There are a couple of flaws with that notion though. One, while the On2 codec is good, if you’re looking for very high quality video (the kind you’d pay for), it won’t be as good as other already-DRMed solutions. So the market would be mostly smaller clips or things like TV shows that stations want to give people access to, but may want to control more closely. In that case, there’s Flash Media Server, but the price point is high for most people, and if your site really starts bringing in users, you’re beholden to Adobe for a lot of money.
We’ll see what Widevine offers, but I can’t imagine it’s a solution that will work for most users. Even if it is successful, and they start making money, Adobe can cut them off by implementing it themselves. My hunch here is that Widevine, which uses a downloadable client, wants to tie themselves to the Flash wagon so they can use Flash’s penetration to increase their own downloadable client numbers.
[tags]Flash, DRM, Widevine[/tags]
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