There seems to be quite the buzz online about Adobe’s plans to DRM the next version of Flash and the associated player. While part of me is thinking – what is going to be so hard about getting the petabytes of content that is already out there and not DRMed to play in the old players – what will be the killer content offered in the new DRM version of the software? What will be the reason for the great masses to upgrade?
I’m not entirely sure what the upgrade reason will be, but my gut thinks that the something might be YouTube. This is total speculation, but if YouTube switches overnight to the new format for all it’s video and forces the new video player, people will have to switch to get their YouTube fix. For most people, this won’t be a big deal, unless you want to save those files. This change will also then in one fell swoop, eliminate all those many petabytes of non DRMed Flash content.
On the whole, I don’t think most people will care, but developers certainly will. Some might jump the boat and start to look at other systems – Silverlight comes to mind, but that is also DRMed (come on, it’s from M$!) and maybe that is the key. Adobe might be doing this DRM thing to stop big content producers from going to Silverlight – lured by the DRM features there.
As a closing thought, I really don’t know what kind of lure that is… it seems that as soon as a DRM scheme is sealed, it is cracked, becoming more a nuisance than anything else for those who are willing to do some level of foot/fingerwork to get around it. But with the advent of DRM, companies have a legal way of getting their pound of flesh, so technically the DRM could be a sticker (like a EULA… anyone actually read those or find it funny that you have to open/install the software/hardware to see the agreement?) and the lawyers could still have their day.
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