> Another case for piracy I guess.

The notion here is, because of these annoying steps and gotchas, there will not be 4k rips of their content floating around. I don't keep up on the piracy scene these days but I have to imagine that it can still be done, as with the setup from the blog. So goes the story of DRM, it is a painful step that doesn't quite prevent piracy - but if you're netflix or other streaming services, you're working closely with the implementors of the DRM tech (microsoft, widevine, others) and you're not going to just throw in the towel given that it's always a work in progress.

Sometimes there are also licensing requirements around having DRM attached, probably applies to Netflix in certain cases (although less and less these days).

This is because of DRM integrations. If any part of the chain between netflix and secure memory in your display cannot be verified, or does not meet some standard, you get the degraded experience.

Change user-agent to impersonate Edge.

This is why I won't pay for premium resolution upgrades. It's too much of a hassle to ensure the entire video chain is providing what I paid for.

It's more than that, Edge has far more DRM in it.

I believe this is because Edge is capable of decrypting and displaying DRM-protected 4K streams. I don't think it's just Netflix being difficult.

Requiring draconian DRM that doesn’t work everywhere with confusing and arbitrary restrictions for paying customers IS Netflix being difficult.

If they removed the DRM, they'd get a lot of resistance licensing shows. As long as content-producers insist on DRM, Netflix has to use DRM.

I believe their licence terms are also the reason you can download some Netflix videos to your phone/Windows 10 machine, but not others.

There are also some that can only be downloaded limited number of times (a year). Example - Gotham, at least in my country.

Uhh ... what? What does the word "download" mean in that context?

I mean if you download it once, you have it.