Preventing screenshots takes resources. You need engineering,l time, the solution itself consumes system memory, needs additional code at run time and ultimately consumes more power on the devices. All of these apple doesn’t want to spend; so I would guess may be there were attempts to reconstruct movies using screenshots or may be it was asked of them?
Not supporting any party in this case, but this argument is weak.
This is like saying "putting padlocks cost money. We have to make sure we research about locks, buy the right one, give right people the keys. It is easier to just .. keep the door unlocked"
Every solution has its costs. The question is whether those costs outweight the benefits it seemingly brings. In this particular case, Apple has decided the DRM implementation costs outweight the benefits.
It’s probably due to some licensing verbiage because these DRM implementations do just about nothing good. Pirates still rip videos from these platforms somehow, but the usual customer can’t watch the 4K they paid for on most browsers. So, it must be an idiosyncrasy at some management/licensing level, not something that serves a functional purpose.
And frankly, the “buy 4K, but we will serve you 1080p in most cases” sounds like a class action lawsuit in the making anyway. So, if anything, this DRM scheme will cost them more than just wasted engineer time.
