The passage of time has already shown on numerous occasions that it has no regard for technology. Technological obsolescence is knocking on the door of all devices, but especially those that use the Windows operating system. Now it has been revealed that users of older versions of the platform are faced with a new problem: they can no longer play some content.
Microsoft has been one of the companies that has been most reluctant to continue letting old technology linger around. The company has made it clear in recent years that it is willing to do away with all technology considered to be legacy. And little by little its various creations that have already become obsolete are being put to death. The latest is Windows Media DRM technology, which you may well have heard of.
Goodbye to watching content with DRM
This is the conclusion of what is happening. The company has decided to remove support for its WMDRM and this means that the protected content that was previously visible in these older versions of Windows will now no longer be viewable. Fortunately, the axe blow to this support only occurs in a few versions of Windows, although we already imagine that it is only a matter of time before others fall in the future.
This means that users who are still using Windows 7 and Windows 8 will be affected. But not only them, but also all those users who are using the legacy versions of the Silverlight and Windows Media Player clients. This increases the total and, on the other hand, it is also revealed that there is a problem for those who were still using their Xbox 360 console. Thus, those who used the Silverlight or Windows 8 program with the intention of sending multimedia content to play it on the console will no longer be able to do so.
All of this may seem irrelevant to us, especially if we are using Windows 11. But the reality is that there are many more people who still use Windows 7, Windows 8 or even the aforementioned console from the Xbox range. Therefore, it is not going to be a service cessation that does not generate some bad impressions among these people in the community, especially if they were quite used to using multimedia content playback.
What’s happening with PlayReady?
In the previous paragraph we talked about WMDRM, which was the original DRM that Microsoft put into circulation in 1999. In those legendary times, so far in the past that you probably didn’t live through them or don’t remember them very well, the now legendary Windows 8 version of the operating system was launched. The DRM tool arrived with this launch and was designed so that users could take advantage of Windows Media Player to view content that was protected.
WMDRM was put on the back burner a while ago due to the release of PlayReady, its successor. That happened in 2007, so it’s been “only” 17 years. Because of this, we also wonder if we’ll soon find ourselves facing the end of support for it as well. Microsoft hasn’t said anything about it yet and it’s safe to assume that there will be some time between the two end of support.
What the company has done is reiterate, once again, that support for Silverlight, as we said a few lines above, is ending. The company already put an end to Silverlight 5 a few years ago and now wants to get rid of this framework once and for all. With similar characteristics and essence to Adobe’s now defunct Flash, Silverlight is also disappearing in this new wave of changes.
Some experts are wondering why Windows, which in the past stood out very positively in everything related to supporting legacy systems and tools, is changing. The real reasons are unknown, but it is true that the company has changed its priorities in recent years for reasons that may be more or less understandable to users. In the case of WMDRM, it is possible that Microsoft, which no longer finds its existence logical since it has no use in Windows 11, prefers to clean up to save resources. In any case, it is still curious how the classic versions of Windows are falling apart day after day. There are those who will miss them even though, objectively, it does not make much sense for there to still be computers with Windows 7.
