Format wars not confusing enough: behold a new DRM alliance

January 24, 2005

GristyMcFisty used our news submit to tell us what we already know,
there are too many formats out there, especially for the average Joe on the
street. But, now to make matters worse, it looks like there is a conspiracy
against piracy that will make the format wars just one facet of your
decision. How about some more flavors of Digital Rights Management?

Sony, Philips, Matsushita and Samsung are joining hands in an
effort to stop the pirating of music and films. Even though they admit that that
they cannot guarantee that content protection they devise will be able to
protect the content, they are still forging ahead to create a scheme that
closely models the online music wrappers. Meaning that the main concern will be
that the content will play on the hardware they provide, but there will be
limitations as to what else can be done with it. The article indicates that they
are probably going to model these protections after the oh so popular iTi=unes
and Napster paradigms. Well that might work for cherry picking your lossy tunes
to have something to hear on your iPod, but will it fly on a full blown retail
purchase?

The move is widely seen as a way for the four firms to decide
their own destiny on content control systems instead of having to sign up
for those being pushed by Apple and Microsoft.

Confusingly for consumers, the technology that comes out of the
alliance will sit alongside the content control systems of rival firms
such as Microsoft and Apple.

"In many ways the different DRM systems are akin to the different
physical formats, such as Betamax and VHS, that consumers have seen in the
past," said Ian Fogg, personal technology and broadband analyst at Jupiter
Research.

"The difference is that it is very fragmented," he said. "It's not
a two-horse race, it's a five, six, seven or even eight-horse race"

Mr Fogg said consumers had to be very careful when buying digital
content to ensure that it would play on the devices they own. He said
currently there were even incompatibilities within DRM families.

Although initiatives such as Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" program
could help remove some of the uncertainty, he said, life was likely to be
confusing for consumers for some time to come.

Yes, those devices and media are going to fly
off the shelves! To make room for products that people want to buy. Here is a
news flash to the manufacturers and content providers out there developing
these exciting new DRM formats: We don't want another war! No one is so excited
about content that they will shell out hard earned money with a risk of making
the wrong decision and having an obsolete high dollar player,recorder or piece
of contenton their hands.

Everyone is still in love with DVD and CSS. Start playing games now with DRM
coupled with this already exsisting format war and you will have customers
leaving stores in droves, happily picking up thier favorite movie DVD's for
as little as seven or eight dollars and waiting to see the outcome of this new
cat fight. Or simply wait for the new schemes to become hacked and useless,
whichever comes first.

Source: BBC