The important fact being that it only applied to the Intel iGPU. You also had the option to disable that and the HW decoding with the iGPU was also disabled.
The successor is called Intel Insider and it's still aimed at the GPU. Basically it's there to make sure the stream goes to the GPU (which has DRM) to be decrypted not to the CPU. That's because nobody was "courageous" enough until now to put the DRM label on a CPU.
