Embodiments are directed towards enabling a portion of a protected content stream to be played in a degraded quality or experience at a client device when a key and/or license for some other portion of the content stream is unobtainable, or is not obtained by the client device. A content stream has a plurality of layers, with a baseline layer having a lowest quality level of the plurality of layers that is unencrypted, while at least one other layer is encrypted. When the key to decrypt the encrypted layer(s) is unobtained, at least the baseline unencrypted layer is allowed to still play at the client device.