[SGVLUG] No Netflix for Linux

[Christopher Smith]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 11:56 AM, Michael Proctor-Smith
<mproctor13 at gmail.com> wrote:
> The reason that Netflix does not support generic Linux desktop
> is that the generic Linux desktop does not support an approved DRM
> scheme.

That's not entirely true, though perhaps I'm arguing over semantics
here. The DRM scheme is quite portable and Linux supports it just fine
(hence its existence on various Linux-based platforms). Getting a
license & certificate for a generic Linux desktop is the issue. It
seems like it *ought* to be possible to do so for a stand alone app,
but it isn't clear that it'd be worth Netflix's time & money.

> Android, Roku, Chrome OS are all Linux based but have
> implemented DRM that Netflix feels is compatible with what ever the
> content owners are requiring.

Having spoken to people at Netflix, I can tell you that the content
owners are actually very precise about the whole tech stack for
playing their content. They wanted the Silverlight & PlayRight for
PC's.

> The solution is for the open source community to design and implement
> a DRM scheme that could work in the open source ecosystem. Most of the
> problem being that many, I might say most, in the open source
> community are against DRM for philosophical reasons. So chances of DRM
> scheme being implemented that would be acceptable to content owners
> and the FOSS community is low.

The bigger problem is that DRM is just hard to make work with a
hackable system, so even if you *could* implement something, you'd
undoubtedly have to put restrictions in place that would essentially
rob the platform of its open source nature.

> The result is that we don't get to watch Netflix streaming on the
> Linux desktop. Breaking someone else's DRM scheme in order to do some
> thing that user think they "should" be able to do can have unintended
> consequences. People broke DRM on the PS3 in part using Linux so Sony
> took away the ability to run Linux on the PS3.

A lot of it has to do with how the technology gets used. I think if
someone came up with a solution that somehow helped Netflix
subscribers to watch their content natively on Linux without
substantially changing whatever *else* they could do with the content
(which isn't unrealistic, particularly given that you *can* access the
content from inside a VM hosted on Linux), there'd not be much in the
way of consequences one way or the other.

-- 
Chris