As far as I'm concerned It's a good thing that there are too many DRM'd technologies.
They are all stamping on each other, engaging in corporate infighting, patenting the underlying DRM technology and so on. Apple want their walled garden, Google their one and nothing from one store plays on another's device. And content providers keep demanding all their resellers implement the stuff dispite anyone being able to grab anything off the PirateBay.
As a result the clear path is to avoid DRM and go with formats that play anywhere. Or people will just pirate everything.
Having one DRM standard that does play everywhere could provide a kind of unity amongst DRM. This is dangerous, we don't want that crap getting stronger. It could lead to a point where consumers are fine with DRM and are not pissed of because they can't play their iPod music on their new Android phone. People becoming accepting of DRM doesn't seem like a good outcome at all.
Fortunately that isn't what we are likely to get. The standard doesn't specify any actual DRM mechanism so they will keep having their walled gardens and competing technology, they will just be able to put them in a HTML5 UI instead. So in the end adding this to HTML5 seems to be totally pointless. Vendors could already implement their own extensions to HTML5 this is nothing more than a 'put drm here' hint. It's unlikely that vendors would implement anything that would allow competitors content to plan on their platform.
They are all stamping on each other, engaging in corporate infighting, patenting the underlying DRM technology and so on. Apple want their walled garden, Google their one and nothing from one store plays on another's device. And content providers keep demanding all their resellers implement the stuff dispite anyone being able to grab anything off the PirateBay.
As a result the clear path is to avoid DRM and go with formats that play anywhere. Or people will just pirate everything.
Having one DRM standard that does play everywhere could provide a kind of unity amongst DRM. This is dangerous, we don't want that crap getting stronger. It could lead to a point where consumers are fine with DRM and are not pissed of because they can't play their iPod music on their new Android phone. People becoming accepting of DRM doesn't seem like a good outcome at all.
Fortunately that isn't what we are likely to get. The standard doesn't specify any actual DRM mechanism so they will keep having their walled gardens and competing technology, they will just be able to put them in a HTML5 UI instead. So in the end adding this to HTML5 seems to be totally pointless. Vendors could already implement their own extensions to HTML5 this is nothing more than a 'put drm here' hint. It's unlikely that vendors would implement anything that would allow competitors content to plan on their platform.