> blaming the services for putting that term in the contract and obligating you to do it.
I think you're vastly overestimating customers' willingness to listen and care about whose fault it is. In practice, if Netflix (or whatever other app) suddenly stopped working on Android phones, people using Android would complain about their phones being broken whilst their iPhone-using friends continue to use the app just fine.
The media companies know that they will win that game of chicken every time. It would take a concerted effort across tech companies to really take them down, and nobody is interested in waging that war because the cost of simply implementing DRM is too low for it to be worth the struggle and the risk.
> In practice, if Netflix (or whatever other app) suddenly stopped working on Android phones, people using Android would complain about their phones being broken whilst their iPhone-using friends continue to use the app just fine.
Complaining about it and immediately buying a different phone are two different things. And in the meantime, what are they doing? Watching YouTube or whatever other service doesn't use DRM instead of Netflix, and then continuing to watch the things they started watching on that service on their TV when they get home, and then wondering why they're still paying for the one they're not using anymore.
Notice also that a huge proportion of these people don't have an iPhone because they can't afford one -- cheapest new iPhone is ~$600, cheapest new Android is ~$50 -- so switching platforms was never an option for them. And conversely, that the people whose identity and sense of self is tied up in having an iPhone are certainly not going to buy an Android over Netflix.
> The media companies know that they will win that game of chicken every time.
Evidence to the contrary. Every time one of these popular DRM systems gets cracked, do they stop using it and lose all of the customers who have that platform? No, they just keep using the broken one because not losing a lot of customers is way more important to them than the DRM.
I think you're vastly overestimating customers' willingness to listen and care about whose fault it is. In practice, if Netflix (or whatever other app) suddenly stopped working on Android phones, people using Android would complain about their phones being broken whilst their iPhone-using friends continue to use the app just fine.
The media companies know that they will win that game of chicken every time. It would take a concerted effort across tech companies to really take them down, and nobody is interested in waging that war because the cost of simply implementing DRM is too low for it to be worth the struggle and the risk.