
The End of Indie Web Browsers: You Can (Not) Compete - smaddock
https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/
======
zentiggr
I for one would love to see new browsers come forward and explicitly state
that they are not implementing EME in any way, and see just how that plays
out.

My optimistic (maybe too deeply rose colored) vision would be for viewership
of EME-locked content to drop off so far that the companies using it have to
give up and reopen distribution.

~~~
Mindwipe
> My optimistic (maybe too deeply rose colored) vision would be for viewership
> of EME-locked content to drop off so far that the companies using it have to
> give up and reopen distribution.

They never had open distribution, they just had plug-ins.

All web browsers put together do not have enough market share of video views
to make a material difference. Most major video services have less than 10% of
views via personal computers at all, and could shift 80% of that to an
application without much issue.

~~~
zentiggr
If those numbers are reasonably solid, I can see a positive outcome to refusal
of EME support. Now I'm even more convinced it's a good idea.

~~~
Mindwipe
How? I cannot understand that logic at all.

~~~
zentiggr
If only 10% of DRMed viewership is through EME in browsers, then dropping EME
from browsers is far easier than if it were, say, 50 or 75%.

------
theamk
Note this only applies to a small number of websites: Netflix, Hulu, etc...
And there are plenty of people who do not visit those websites from their
primary computer.

So while this is definitely annoying, this is hardly the end for _all_ the
indie browsers -- just like EA banning Linux gamers does not mean that all
gaming on Linux is dead.

~~~
jedikv
It should be noted that those small number of websites are collectively
responsible for most of the internet traffic today:

[https://www.ncta.com/whats-new/report-where-does-the-
majorit...](https://www.ncta.com/whats-new/report-where-does-the-majority-of-
internet-traffic-come)

~~~
theamk
(1) Those numbers do not make distinction between Youtube/Vimeo (no DRM) and
Netflix/Hulu (DRM). As an anecdote, none of my friends watch Netflix on their
desktops, so while they spend plenty of bandwidth, none of them requires
Widevine.

(2) Those numbers are bytes transferred, which is hardly a good metric of user
importance. If you look at "top 100 websites" reports, like [0], you see there
are no DRM-only sites at the top -- Netflix, for example, is on position 25.

[0] [https://ahrefs.com/blog/most-visited-
websites/](https://ahrefs.com/blog/most-visited-websites/)

~~~
smaddock
The project I built and mentioned in the article, Metastream [1], is used to
sync videos across browsers. It now lives as a browser extension and I'm able
to track which web domains are most commonly used by the app.

Based on the usage statistics for the past month (28,711 samples), these are
some commonly used media websites:

1\. www.youtube.com (69%)

2\. www.netflix.com (5%)

3\. www.crunchyroll.com (2.5%)

4\. www.hulu.com (0.8%)

5\. www.funimation.com (0.3%)

6\. www.disneyplus.com (0.3%)

7\. other (22.1%)

The app is heavily skewed towards anime which already has a problem with
piracy. That said, we can at least see that approx. 9% of traffic in my app is
for DRM-enabled media.

Personally, I don't think the usage statistics of DRM media matters much. It
shouldn't be a requirement to consume any content on the web to begin with.

[1]
[https://github.com/samuelmaddock/metastream](https://github.com/samuelmaddock/metastream)

