Would you ever like to pay for a device that won’t let you stream Netflix’s HD content even after you have subscribed for it? Especially in a world of 4k and 8k? Make a smart choice and always look out for Widevine Certification while buying a new phone. What’s a Widevine L1 Certificate? A Widevine Digital Rights Management (DRM) L1 certificate for a phone defines the level of security it has been loaded with for content protection. It is meant to prevent the copying or piracy of data that services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and others provide to their users/subscribers. These services can stream appropriate content quality depending upon the Security Level and Hardware of the device without having to do much work on the server end. There are three certification levels on basis of DRM: L1, L2, and L3. Your device needs to be Widevine l1 certified in order to be able to run HD content. This may come as a surprise to you but many of the affordable and high-end phones coming these days do not support HD content streaming on apps like Netflix, Amazon Prime and others. No matter what you have subscribed to, if your phone hasn’t received Widevine DRM Level 1 (L1) certification you won’t be able to watch HD content over these platforms. This may sound new to you but yes it’s true. No Widevine L1 means No HD content! That’s not all, even after having Widevine L1 certification, an additional acknowledgement by these OTT platform is also required by a device to run their content in high definition quality. Providing Widevine certification to a device doesn’t charge any licensing fee but due to user’s lack of knowledge in this area the manufacturers are ignoring to adopt this because more users are not particularly asking for it. If you want to check your device’s Widevine certification, there are apps on the Playstore that can help you gain this data.
