digital rights management software.
Google engineers on Monday announced their intention to build the DRM feature into Chrome for Android on a mailing list for Blink, the browser engine at the heart of Chrome and its open-source foundation, Chromium. Google acquired Widevine in 2010 ; Netflix and Blockbuster use the technology for barring unauthorized copying and optimizing online streaming.
DRM in the browser has been a touchy subject. Ian Hickson, for years a central figure in HTML standardization, doesn't like the idea , and nor does the Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and other groups. Google and Microsoft pushed on anyway and helped to create a standard called Encrypted Media Extensions that doesn't specify how the DRM works but does say how the browser can hand off decryption to another software module.
Widevine is one such module. Also being added to Chrome for Android are support for the clear-key decryption described in the EME specification and support for the Media Source Extension interface that lets Web pages' JavaScript software take control of video to better enable techniques such as adapting to changing network speeds.