DRM Support?

[aphillipo]

Some of these services support DRM (like widevine) and encryption; any plans to surface these features... I could consider putting together a pull request if you guys are open to it?

[flavioribeiro]

hey @aphillipo, we're not serving any DRM content on nytimes.com for now but a PR would be more than welcome!

[aphillipo]

Haha - for now ;-)

Looking at the issues with DRM: there is very little in the way of specs for the licensing server, this is that best I've found:

https://storage.googleapis.com/wvdocs/Widevine_DRM_Proxy_Integration.pdf

The HTML5 player + licensing server should use EME to decrypt the content. However, it seems the player has to support all the licensing servers/encryption systems (Apple Fairplay, Play Ready, Widevine) to be fully compatible with all DRM devices. It's maybe needed to (AFAIK) sign licensing agreements with Widevine, Microsoft and Apple.

Solutions and information on how this actually works seems like a nightmare and I can't find if it's required to register with each of these licence server providers individually even though they all do almost the same thing! It seems writing one of these servers (they aren't that complex, just obscure and proprietary) is forbidden!

[aphillipo]

To be honest for this we should just add the flags/licencing servers and some keys we generate to encrypt our video. Aside from that it would be up to the user to use the video player of choice.

[aphillipo]

This needs some thought because for example bitmovin doesn't support Apple FairPlay but it'd e nice if we could attract that from the user knowing about it (the bitmovin player seems to know about it).

This requires I'd say quite a bit of work. I'm just going to use HLS for now, should be fine mostly.