Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) is a
W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...
specification for providing a communication channel between
web browser
A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...
s and the Content Decryption Module (CDM) software which implements
digital rights management
Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures, such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM ...
(DRM).
This allows the use of
HTML video to play back DRM-wrapped content such as
streaming video
Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos, television shows and films digitally on request. These multimedia are accessed without a traditional video playback device and a typical static broadcasting ...
services without the use of heavy third-party media plugins like
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a mostly discontinuedAlthough it is discontinued by Adobe Inc., for the Chinese market it is developed by Zhongcheng and for the international enterprise market it is developed by Ha ...
or
Microsoft Silverlight
Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich internet applications, similar to Adobe Inc., Adobe's Run time environment, runtime, Adobe Flash. While early versions of Silverlight focused on ...
(both discontinued). The use of a third-party
key management system may be required, depending on whether the publisher chooses to scramble the keys.
EME is based on the
Media Source Extensions (MSE) specification, which enables adaptive bitrate streaming in HTML audio and video, e.g. using
MPEG-DASH
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also known as MPEG-DASH, is an adaptive bitrate streaming technique that enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. Similar to Appl ...
with
MPEG-CENC protected content.
EME has been highly controversial because it places a necessarily