Widevine is a vendor of digital rights management software. One of its early technologies included a software system that replaced smart cards that eliminated the cost and logistical complexity of the card's distribution and introduced the abilities to process more sophisticated rights. It was purchased by Google within an acquisition trend that represented the search company's development needs.
Usage
Widevine DRM is used with the Chromium-based proprietary web browsers and on Android. It supports MPEG-DASH and HLS. Google Chrome and Chrome OS make use of Encrypted Media Extensions and Media Source Extensions with Widevine. Over thirty chipsets, six major desktop and mobile operating systems, and Google properties such as Chromecast and Android TV have adopted Widevine. Companies including Amazon Prime Video, BBC, Hulu, Netflix, Spotify and Disney+ use Widevine DRM to manage the distribution of premium content. It is also used by Firefox since v47, released in 2016, by default on Microsoft Windows and optional on Linux; it can be uninstalled or disabled in the browser settings. Prior to that, Mozilla used Adobe's Primetime DRM for some versions.
Shaka Player – Google developed open-source HTML5 web-based player available on GitHub.
Shaka Packager – Google developed open-source content packaging solution available on GitHub. The packager supports MPEG-DASH and HLS for VOD or linear based content.
Electron Framework – Widevine partnered with castLabs to integrate the Widevine client into the Electron framework for use with desktop application development. The integration, however, still requires anyone, who wants to distribute/use it in their application to sign a license agreement with Google.
Kodi - starting from version 18, the add-on installs Widevine automatically on supported platforms for DRM playback.
Criticism
In 2019, a developer tried to bundle Widevine in an Electron/Chromium-based application for video playing and did not get any response from Google after asking for a license agreement, effectively blocking DRM usage in the project. He later got the reply: The same happened to other Electron projects. Developers of a competing browser to Chrome, Brave, also had issues when trying to get a license from Google.
