PlayReady on Android and iOS Shines at NAB April 14, 2011
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in DRM, Mobile, Technologies.1 comment so far
Three vendors of DRM technology made announcements timed to this week’s huge NAB conference in Las Vegas: AuthenTec, BuyDRM, and Discretix. The common theme among these announcements was support for Microsoft’ PlayReady DRM on the Android and Apple iOS platforms.
AuthenTec, a company based in Florida whose main business is fingerprint readers (as in human fingerprints, not digital ones), acquired DRM assets from SafeNet a year ago. These assets included a multi-DRM framework called DRM Fusion and OMA DRM software — acquired respectively from DMDSecure of the Netherlands in 2005 and Beep Science of Norway in 2008.
Usually this many acquisitions in so short a time implies deals that are euphemistically called “asset sales” and an acquiring company that lets the technology wither and die. I had serious doubts that AuthenTec was going to do anything with the SafeNet DRM product lines other than support existing customers, but this announcement dispels that doubt. DRM Fusion enables service providers to distribute content packaged in several different DRM formats; it originally supported Windows Media DRM (Microsoft’s older technology), then added OMA DRM support. Now it has added support for PlayReady in a downloadable application for Android and Apple iOS clients called DRM Fusion Agent.
BuyDRM of Austin, TX, is a longtime Microsoft partner that has built its DRM service infrastructure, KeyOS, around Windows Media DRM. It announced KeyOS: Cloud Edition, a version of KeyOS that uses Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud-based service platform. Along with the support for Windows Azure, BuyDRM will be offering PlayReady for Android and iOS. BuyDRM has HBO Eastern Europe as a launch customer, and general release is planned for June.
Discretix of Israel has also been known for multi-DRM support, focusing on mobile clients. It too had been supporting Windows Media DRM and OMA DRM implementations. But its new product, SecurePlayer, focuses exclusively on PlayReady for Android and iOS. SecurePlayer is a downloadable application that combines a port of PlayReady to the target device along with a video player that is tightly coupled to the DRM. This is more secure than a DRM implementation that merely relies on a device’s native video player, where content can be exposed in the clear.
All of these DRMs focus on delivery of video to “app phones” and tablets, whether through download or streaming. This ties in with the more general trend of providing a given set of video content on any device — via a service like Hulu, the cable industry’s TV Everywhere initiative, or other channels. Services like these need cross-platform DRM support in order to comply with studio and network licensing requirements. Meanwhile, Microsoft is doing little by itself — other than making an SDK available — to help enable porting of its DRM onto non-Microsoft platforms. Thus the opportunity for these third-party vendors.
Another trend that these announcements indicate is further indication of OMA DRM 2.x’s fade into irrelevance. The number of services using this DRM has been small enough as it is. In the music market, its demise was hastened last year with the news that Vodafone was phasing out its OMA DRM 2.1-based mobile music subscription service in favor of paid MP3 downloads. The number of vendors offering OMA DRM implementations has dwindled.
Of course, other cross-platform DRMs for portable video-capable devices are available, such as Marlin (Intertrust) and NDS VideoGuard. (The fate of Widevine’s DRM technology after its acquisition by Google late last year is uncertain.) But PlayReady is the hot technology of the moment.
Now, on a completely different subject:
Personal Appeal for Aid to Japan
I have heard people say that the crisis unfolding in Japan is horrible but they aren’t sure how to help. Many organizations are collecting money, but it’s hard to know how it will be used or where it will go. Now here’s a more targeted and personal way to help:
My brother-in-law has lived in Japan for several years. He lives in Tokyo now, but he started out teaching English in a village called Kawauchi, which is within the evacuation zone in Fukushima Prefecture near the stricken Daiichi nuclear plant. He has deep personal relationships with people in the village and is organizing aid for its few thousand residents, who are currently in a facility analogous to the New Orleans Superdome after Hurricane Katrina here in the U.S. He says:
Please send:
Toys and activities for children, school supplies, paper products including tampons, diapers for children and adults, personal wipes, tissues, toothpaste and toothbrushes (including for dentures) make-up, shampoo, games, new clothes, music, books and magazines (in Japanese only).
Sending along special foods and snacks will definitely be appreciated. Rations at the evacuation center are not particularly pleasant!
Aside from the basics, please feel free to send anything you think might cheer the villagers up. It is unlikely that any of them will be able to see their homes for many years, if ever.
Please note that people of Kawauchi Village cannot read English past a first grade level. Many of the evacuees are elderly, too.
Pass this note on and feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions. Thank you! – Barry Lustig, barry_lustig@hotmail.com
Here is the address:
Yoshinobu Ishii from Kawauchi Village
South 2-52, Koriyama City
Fukushima Prefecture
963-0115 JAPAN
telephone: (+82) 09022773557
〒963-0115 福島県郡山市南二丁目52番地
川内村教育長石井芳信 様
Music Forecast: Cloudy April 5, 2011
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Business models, Mobile, Music, Services.3 comments
The latest trend in online music services is a feature set sometimes known as “cloud sync.” With cloud sync, users can upload their MP3s to an Internet server, which will copy the files onto the user’s other devices, stream the music onto devices with MP3 players and Internet connections, or both.
Cloud sync is not a new concept. It has been incorporated into several music services, including MP3tunes, DoubleTwist, Audiogalaxy, GrooveShark, Spotify (paid version), Catch Media, Rdio, and MOG. But last week’s launch of Amazon Cloud Player has thrust cloud sync into the limelight and raises some interesting legal and economic issues. Cloud Player is the client side of a cloud sync service that also includes Cloud Drive, Amazon’s existing online storage facility.
The legal question is: does a service provider need a license from music companies in order to offer this set of services? The answer appeared to be yes… until last week.
Music industry provocateur Michael Robertson initiated the cloud sync trend in 2005 with MP3tunes. MP3tunes let users stream their music to any MP3-enabled Internet device. It also went a step further by identifying music in users’ collections and letting them skip the upload step if the music was already in MP3tunes’ server library; essentially all you had to do was prove you owned the music and it would be available online. The music industry sued MP3tunes, alleging that it did not have the rights to do this. The suit is unresolved at this writing.
Other services, such as Rdio, MOG, and Spotify offer cloud sync features as part of their paid subscription streaming services. One would assume that cloud sync rights were included in the license agreements they negotiated with the record companies to supply music.
Yet other services, including MP3tunes, don’t actually supply music; they just work with users’ own files. So does Amazon’s Cloud Player; it is separate from Amazon’s MP3 retail store (for the most part; more on this shortly). And thanks to Ars Technica, we now know that Amazon doesn’t have music licenses for Cloud Player.
Amazon claims that it doesn’t need any additional license. Its position is that it is merely helping users play music they already own and do what they could do with any number of existing online storage services. Sony Music, for one, has raised concerns about this.
Amazon launched Cloud Player quickly in order to get to market before similar services from Apple as well as Google. As David Pogue points out in the New York Times, Amazon is trying to give consumers reasons to use its music services instead of iTunes. The major record companies gave Amazon licenses to distribute music in DRM-free MP3 format back in 2007 in order to create a viable competitor to iTunes. It’s also noteworthy that Cloud Player uses Flash, so it won’t run on Apple iOS devices.
From that perspective, some record companies might want to welcome any features that Amazon can add that attract users away from iTunes — at least until Apple launches its own streaming services. Amazon is most likely betting that the combination of offering record companies a better competitor to iTunes and “we have big lawyers, so go ahead and sue us” will deter the majors from taking legal action where they had done so before.
Yet there is another aspect of the legal argument. As I argued in my discussion of Catch Media a few months ago, the odds are that most of the files that users upload to cloud sync services don’t contain music that they really own in the first place: it’s illegal downloads or ripped CDs from friends. Record companies are concerned that cloud-sync services merely encourage unauthorized copying by making the copies more valuable.
Of course, a suitable license fee could ameliorate or eliminate those concerns, as it has done for Catch Media. That brings us to business model issues.
Amazon offers Cloud Player for free… up to a point. Users can store up to 5GB for free, enough space for roughly 1200-1400 songs. If you want more space, you have to pay Amazon for it, US $1 per GB per year or about a third of a cent per song per year. Yet if you buy MP3s from Amazon, Amazon includes the online storage space for them at no extra charge.
This mostly-free standalone cloud sync model, as opposed to those offered as part of paid monthly subscription services, will wreak havoc on other standalone cloud sync providers that depend on revenue from direct consumer payments (Catch Media), advertising (GrooveShark, Audiogalaxy, DoubleTwist), or both (MP3tunes). Catch Media’s one retail partner (Carphone Warehouse in the UK) charges users about $4/month for unlimited use. That’s not sustainable pricing.
It’s pretty clear where this will end up: once Apple and Google enter the streaming market, cloud sync will be a “bullet list item” for all music services and will be expected to be entirely or mostly free. Music services will need to find other ways to create value that consumers will want to pay for. Sell T-shirts, maybe?
Cricket Wireless Sings the Same Old Song December 21, 2010
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Business models, DRM, Mobile, Music, United States.1 comment so far
Cricket Wireless, a small wireless carrier that spun out of Qualcomm in 1998, announced the imminent launch of a new music service called MuveMusic. The service will launch at CES next month in the Las Vegas area, with other markets to be added later. Unfortunately, the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital blog (piece written by Ina Fried of CNet, who ought to know better), Engadget, and other media outlets have fallen for the deceptive hype that this service has created for itself.
MuveMusic calls itself “the first wireless plan with unlimited music included.” It offers a library of millions of tracks from all of the major music companies. This description is misleading. MuveMusic is actually similar to services offered in Europe and elsewhere, such as from Vodafone and other carriers through Omnifone’s white-label MusicStation service. It’s really a paid monthly subscription music service where the US $10/month fee happens to be tacked onto your mobile phone bill instead of paid separately, as with Rhapsody, Napster, MOG, Rdio, etc.
The only “first” about the business model is that it is the first such price-bundling deal to launch in the United States. (Look carefully at the quotes from the music execs in Cricket’s press release and you’ll see that they agree.) And the network offering it is a small one by US standards, with about 5 million subscribers, compared to over 90 million each for AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless.
As for the technology, Cricket also claims that the service offers “DRM-free files,” the truth of which — to be charitable — depends on your definition of “DRM.” The files themselves are not encrypted, though they are surely sent over the air to the handset (about which more shortly) using an encrypted protocol. But the files are stored in a secure partition of a special SD card from Sandisk. The files can only play on the user’s handset; capacity is limited to 3000 songs (or about 300 albums); there is no streaming. It’s unclear whether a user can take her SD card to another MuveMusic-licensed handset and play the music there (thereby “lending” the music). Unlike Vodafone’s service and similar ones, the music files cannot be played on users’ PCs.
In any case, this is not new either, but rather reminiscent of Datz Music Lounge, which launched in the UK back in 2008 and has since folded. Datz Music Lounge offered unlimited downloads for £99/year but required users to insert a dongle-like secure USB device into their PCs in order to download music to them.
In fact, MuveMusic files can only be played on a single handset model, the $199 Samsung Suede SCH-r710. Unlike the Omnifone services (or device maker-based bundled services like Nokia’s Ovi Music Unlimited), MuveMusic files can’t be played on users’ PCs at all.
The “DRM-free” claim that so many new content services make is rich in irony for those of us who have been in the field for a while. In the early days of DRM (mid-late 1990s), the term DRM was meant to cover a wide range of technologies for managing rights in a digital environment, only some of which happened to involve encrypting files and controlling their use. Subsequently the press co-opted the term so that it only referred to the narrower, more restrictive technology. Supporters of rights management cried foul.
Now this interpretation has been turned on its head: content services that put limits on content uses can be called “DRM-free” as long as they don’t meet the narrow definition of DRM or don’t use a “brand-name” DRM technology such as PlayReady or Marlin or OMA DRM or Flash Access or Widevine.
Subscription services like MuveMusic need some form of usage restrictions, otherwise they are too easily abused. MuveMusic is no exception; otherwise the majors would not have licensed it. As I’ve said before, the term “DRM” has turned into a pejorative, so subscription services are using the idea of DRM while avoiding (or, in Cricket’s case, outright denying) the term.
No, Cricket Wireless’s MuveMusic is not a “game changer for everyone,” as Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies amusingly puts it in the press hype. With newer mobile music services offering such features as cloud-based sync among all of a user’s devices, higher-fidelity files, and streaming, all Cricket is really offering is a billing convenience. In all other respects, it’s just singing the same old song.
More Devices, More Platforms, More… DRM June 1, 2010
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Devices, DRM, Mobile, Technologies.add a comment
Microsoft announced last week that it is working with Netflix to roll its PlayReady DRM out to a wide range of consumer electronic devices that will play Netflix streaming content. (PlayReady is already used on Windows and Mac versions of the Netflix app.) Most of these devices are “TBD,” but one isn’t: the Apple iPad.
It seems that once you have a platform with APIs for app developers, you become a platform for DRMs — even if you’re a platform vendor that approves all applications and has its own proprietary DRM (FairPlay).
Several music services’ iPod/iTouch/iPad versions include content protection technology that is DRM by any other name. These include the mobile versions of MOG All Access and Spotify Premium, which call it “file caching for offline listening” and/or “syncing files among your devices.” (Spotify, for example, limits the number of files per device to 3,333 and number of devices per file to 3.)
The same goes for Android and BlackBerry apps, such as Spotify’s app for Android.
Netflix’s use of PlayReady is a form of streaming content protection that uses Microsoft’s own PIFF (Protected Interoperable File Format) — in the same way that Adobe Flash applications can use RTMPE for stream encryption and Flash Access DRM for downloads. The music apps mentioned above use proprietary technologies.
E-book reader applications like the Barnes & Noble e-Reader and Kindle app for iPhone use DRMs on those platforms too: a variation of Adobe Content Server 4 and Amazon’s Mobipocket DRM respectively.
DRM for mobile devices poses some particular challenges in an age where popular application platforms are proliferating, as opposed to the age of the dominant PC. I talked about one of these challenges two months ago, that of software hardening; other challenges will become apparent as the applications mature.
Mobile World Congress: A Preview February 4, 2010
Posted by Bill Jones in Events, Mobile.add a comment
What can we expect from next week’s Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona this year in the copyright and technology arena?
I think it will be a physically quieter show for a variety of reasons. It should also be a slightly lower key show in terms of product announcements etc., due to:
- The continued emphasis in the industry is on cost cutting and infrastructure sharing to deliver returns; so we can expect announcements on deals, technology and products in that domain.
- Investment houses are also encouraging operators to look at demergers to release value as “sum of the parts valuations” are greater than the whole. The effect of this is to consume management attention on these issues whilst having less focus on new products and services.
- Both of these will lead to fewer attendees (cost cutting) and fewer/smaller exhibits offset by more conference time for discussions and debates.
- Many corporates (large and SME’s) have told me that they either shan’t be attending or that their presence is scaled back.
- Technology vendors continue to retrench in the face of quieter markets with the attendant culling of less certain projects.
- The industry has majored on LTE (Long Term Evolution, also known as 4G) as a successor to GSM variants and derivatives, and relegated WiMax and WiFi to niche markets. DRM proposals for the GSM-ish world will quietly be abandoned as new architectures will be required for LTE.
- The current emphasis on app stores will see increasing attention paid to copyright and technology issues. I expect a flurry of announcements here.
- Mobile TV will also command more attention.
- Gaming will also be more visible now that Intel has announced its dual core processors, which enable greater localized processing and content integration in the handset.
- NFC (Near Field Communication) and e-ticketing will also be showing progress, although innovative ideas are hampered by a somewhat reluctant partner ecosystem within which they have to work.
- User experience will command greater attention as the industry fights to reduce churn. Anything that smacks of making life difficult for users will be less successful in gaining traction
- Monetization will also feature more as increasingly viable solutions proliferate into the market.
- Social networking as a revenue driver will be featured, as will M2M and location based services.
- I suspect there will be fewer new mass market consumer product announcements as vendors take other opportunities to differentiate their offerings from the crowded market against a backdrop of reduced market shares, offset by increased niche market products where differentiation can yield better margins.
- And finally, I expect the increased patent litigations between players to occupy conversation time
I shan’t be attending this year – but of course the probability is that I could be wrong on many if not all of the above!
Bill Jones is CEO of Global Village Ltd.
2009 Year in Review, Part 1 December 28, 2009
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Devices, DRM, Mobile, Music, Publishing, Services, Technologies, Video.add a comment
2009 was a year of virtual stagnation in the progress of many technologies for managing copyright. To see this, we can look at developments (or lack thereof) in four areas: home media networks, online content licensing frameworks, content identification technologies, and “classic” DRM.
Let’s look at the last of these first: there were virtually no new developments in DRM technologies this past year. The music industry abandoned DRM for permanent Internet downloads almost a year ago, when the major music companies capitulated to Apple on DRM in exchange for variable track pricing. The majors have hoped to hold onto DRM for mobile downloads. But the simple permanent-download model is not very popular in the mobile arena, and the boundaries between Internet and mobile are growing blurrier and blurrier; so it shouldn’t be long until wireless carriers begin offering piecemeal permanent downloads without DRM.
DRM has remained in two types of music services: subscription downloads with portable device transfer (Rhapsody, Napster) and mobile services with music subsidized by handset makers (Nokia’s Comes With Music, Sony Ericsson’s Play Now Plus). A third type of DRM-protected music service required users to watch ads periodically to maintain access to their free music files. Of the two most talked-about examples of this type of service, SpiralFrog ceased operations while QTrax seems to be in permanent “vamp ’til ready” pre-launch mode.
DRM will remain in 2010 for the above types of services. New models may launch that also depend on DRM. All of these will compete with on-demand streaming services such as Spotify and MOG All Access; yet the on-demand streaming space is bound to consolidate as price competition forces many of these services out of business.
Streaming is also a threat to download models in the video space, as Hulu continues to make inroads against iTunes and many of the other online video services. The online video download market continues to be tiny, due in part to bandwidth constraints (for films) and consumers’ lack of interest in permanent ownership (of TV shows).
Apple still uses its FairPlay DRM for video content, while other services like blockbuster.com and most adult entertainment sites use Windows Media DRM — a technology that Microsoft is phasing out in favor of its newer DRM, PlayReady.
PlayReady is the DRM component of Microsoft’s Silverlight environment for browser-based rich media applications, and as such its use is growing (e.g. Netflix). But its original intended use as a mobile DRM platform seems stalled. Microsoft hasn’t issued any PlayReady-related press releases since April 2009; the major device-subsidized music platforms are using Windows Media DRM and OMA DRM; and mobile video downloads are virtually nonexistent.
The area of the video market that many agree is ripe for growith is in home media networks. This has admittedly been the case for the past few years; the consumer electronics industry views home media networks as the next big green field for new products. Yet developments during 2009 have shown more fragmentation rather than growth.
The movie industry had been coalescing around a standard called DECE (Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem), which was announced two years ago. DECE is a “rights locker” model that will allow users to purchase rights to download a given piece of content, such as a movie, in the formats of their choice. Yet 2009 came and went without any major developments around DECE. Furthermore, Disney opted to break away from the studio pack and announce its own home media interoperability initiative, Keychest, which is a cloud-based streaming model rather than a download model, yet one that still involves user and device authentication. Keychest and DECE are actually more complementary than competitive, but many in the industry see them as a burgeoning “format war.”
To make matters more confusing, CinemaNow announced that it is partnering with Best Buy (the largest “pure play” consumer electronics retailer in the United States) to deliver content into its own home media network ecosystem, which is based on the Widevine DRM. And Amazon has been, rather quietly, adding rights locker features to its Video On Demand service, so that purchasers of certain DVDs and Blu-ray discs can also have on-demand rights to the same content. All this makes for a chaotic scene leading into the big CES trade show next week.
In contrast, the e-book market is finally settling down into a better place for publishers and consumers. As far as DRM is concerned, it’s a two-platform market: Amazon and Adobe. More e-book readers are coming out on the market to compete with Amazon’s Kindle, and two leaders are emerging: the Sony Reader (with two models) and the Barnes and Noble Nook — both based on the Adobe platform.
The Nook in particular is a savior for Adobe. Before it — and with the exception of the solid-selling Sony Readers — Adobe appeared to be headed for a position in the e-book market equivalent to Microsoft’s in music: lots of partners, little traction in the market. But the Nook has two important things going for it: a massive marketing push by the US’s largest book retailer, and a ton of free publicity due to missed ship dates that, ironically, is leading to a public perception of the Nook as a hot, in-demand device. B&N should bask in the glow of brisk sales after the holiday dust clears.
Of course, the wild card in the e-book market is Apple. Both Amazon and Adobe support their formats and DRMs on the iPhone and iPod Touch, but the hype surrounding Apple’s rumored tablet device is deafening. Meanwhile, consumers ought to be able to look forward to increased interoperability and decreased confusion — as well as low prices — in the fast-growing e-book market as we head into the new decade.
Mobile User Experience Hampered by Copyright and Technology December 22, 2009
Posted by Bill Jones in Mobile, Services.add a comment
I recently chaired a two day global conference on mobile user experience in London. Delegates came from US, Europe, Korea, Japan, China, and elsewhere. The usual major players were there, including Vodafone, Telefonica, Samsung, LG, BBC, News International, and Qualcomm as well as boutique design houses.
I got the sense that this was a tricky area for all players.
Whilst in some sense Apple had set a standard with the iPhone to which many aspired, its impact on revenues and bottom line remains small.
Operators are culling their device portfolios (from thousands to less than a hundred in some cases) simply because of the customer service and support costs. Yet the arrival of iPhone has operator CEOs taking a real interest — possibly for the first time — in user experience and saying “this is what we want.” However, we didn’t hear that iPhone would become a major player in the market; its impact on financials is low. Rather it is an exemplar which others are now following.
Of real interest is the App Store, ads and add-ons. But while the iPhone store contains over 90,000 apps, only a few get real usage and traction. Costs and IPR are barriers to more uptake of media applications.
Many spoke of the intellectual property challenges in delivering quality user experiences. Complexity abounds. Designers know what they want but are thwarted in the challenges of bringing quality user experience to market.
And this is at a time when clearly the industry is moving towards the virtualization/cloud computing model and taking functionality off the device to the core. The newly launched Vodafone 360 is such a service. It has a rich App store in which they’ve been able to make some progress in thinking through the IPR and technology issues from an operator and device vendor perspective – a rare development and not an easy thing in this commercially polarized world twixt operator and device vendor.
But corridor gossip also spoke of Intel bringing out a dual processor for mobile devices next year; this will bring significant functionality back to the device.
The other significant vector was the way in which convergence is becoming a reality, leading to similar experiences on the mobile phone screen and the PC. Some spoke of mobile devices now becoming primary target environments for applications that are subsequently adapted for the PC rather than vice versa. The industry recognises that the installed base of mobile devices globally is greater than PC’s.
Finally, managing the IPR issues in social networking was also a challenge to which few answers were proffered.
Bill Jones is CEO of Global Village Ltd.
What’s Next for Nokia’s Comes with Music? November 25, 2009
Posted by Azita Arvani in Mobile, Music, Services.add a comment
Nokia’s Comes With Music offering launched in October 2008 as a new way of bundling music subscription services with mobile phones. The company initially launched the product with a few handset models in the UK. Users get access to unlimited downloadable music service for a year. After that, they can keep the downloaded music on their mobile phones and their PCs.
I was curious to find out what would happen after the bundled music service expired. So I had a chat with Lenn Pryor, VP Product for Music at Nokia. He shared some of their findings from this past year and some of their thinking moving forward.
Depending on the country, Comes with Music (CWM) can be purchased directly through Nokia or through Nokia’s mobile operator or non-operator partners. CWM was first launched in the UK without an operator. Instead, the bundled product was sold through Carphone Warehouse, Europe’s biggest mobile phone retailer. Today, it is offered through 23 operators in 12 countries. The initial “free” music subscription period can vary between 12, 18, or 24 months, depending on the region.
While there is still no date for a US launch, Nokia is focusing on other markets. These include UK and Germany, Singapore and Australia, Brazil and Mexico, and soon Russia.
Nokia does not share specific data on the uptake of this offering. The official word is that the results have met and/or exceeded the internal targets, though this conflicts with reports hear around MIDEM earlier this year that uptake was only 15% of projections.
But Nokia believes users now have a new alternative to discovering and consuming music, and this is borne out by statistics that Pryor shared on CWM usage. Without worrying about paying for each track, users seem to be more adventurous in their music consumption. According to Pryor, the average CWM user downloads 450 tracks in their first 30 days of use. This compares to an a la carte music user downloading 15 tracks. Also, CWM users tend to broaden their music horizons for an average of 7-8 genres per user versus an average of 3 genres for an a la carte music user.
These early data points show a correlation between higher music consumption to subscription services where users don’t have to make individual payment decisions. Of course, the downloading of 450 tracks in the first month includes some level of novelty factor and would be hard to sustain. And having a “free” music subscription can encourage that behavior.
The question then becomes: Can these high levels of interest and consumption be translated to paid subscriptions once the honeymoon period is over? That question will not be answered for at least another three months. For now, Nokia is offering free 3-month extensions as a gift to its initial CWM customers in the UK. The company plans to offer paid monthly or 3-month subscription increments after that — though ideally, Nokia would like to sell them a new CWM phone.
The users will get to keep their DRM-protected downloaded music on one mobile phone and one PC after the subscription expires. Regarding DRM-free music, Pryor says the Nokia a la carte music store is going DRM-free — which would be one of the first mobile music stores to do so. They would like Comes With Music to go DRM-free too, but it is up to the music labels to make that decision.
Azita Arvani is Principal of Arvani Group. Bill Rosenblatt contributed reporting.
Rhapsody Adds iPhone Client September 10, 2009
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Mobile, Music, Services.add a comment
RealNetworks announced today that its Rhapsody application for the iPhone and iPod Touch has been accepted by Apple for inclusion in the App Store. iPhone and iPod Touch owners who subscribe to the Rhapsody To Go music service will be able to download the app for free and use most of the service’s functionality on their devices.
There are many music applications for the iPhone, and there are bound to be many more. But this is a breakthrough: a subscription on-demand service for a wildly popular device that has been a bastion of the paid-download model. Rhapsody To Go subscribers will be able to stream any music track from Rhapsody’s vast library at will through their iPhones.
The only thing they won’t be able to do with their iPhones that they can do — in theory — with Rhapsody-compatible portable devices is transfer downloaded tracks for local playback. That’s because RealNetworks can’t use the iPhone’s native FairPlay DRM to protect subscription downloads, and it can’t (or at least didn’t) implement its own DRM on the iPhone.
I say “in theory” above because Rhapsody’s portable device transfer functionality does not work very smoothly. (The same is true for other subscription-on-demand services, such as Napster.) I’ve documented elsewhere my travails in getting my new Verizon Wireless Blackberry Tour to work with Rhapsody To Go, as it is advertised to do (it still doesn’t work); now my Rhapsody PC client won’t even work with the Sandisk portable music player that I specifically bought for use with Rhapsody.
But with network-enabled portable devices, it’s a whole new ball game. Assuming that a signal with decent bandwidth is available, streaming takes a lot of the complexity out of getting music onto portable devices while preserving rights. Other “all you can eat” mobile music services exist (particularly in Europe), but they don’t offer the library size or music discovery features that Rhapsody does.
The Rhapsody iPhone/iPod Touch client will expose Apple users to a world from which Steve Jobs has sheltered them. Apple has avoided subscription models for music, apparently for a number of reasons, including an unfamiliar customer experience as well as technical complexity in the iTunes ecosystem.
I have thought that subscription services have suffered unfairly from a lack of marketing resources. Paid music subscription services are an unfamiliar model to most users: they aren’t permanent downloads, and they aren’t radio. It takes a lot of education to get people interested in new models, and the press has been decidedly unfriendly, focusing on the lack of permanent ownership instead of the value to music listeners who get tired of hearing the same songs over and over.
Rhapsody on the iPhone is the best chance yet for the subscription model to find a substantial audience. It has the iPhone’s installed base and, one hopes, ease of use that just doesn’t exist in Rhapsody’s current portable device model. Being a fan of subscription download services, I hope it succeeds.
Intertrust Launches OMA DRM Trust Services July 1, 2009
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in DRM, Mobile, Standards, Technologies.add a comment
Intertrust has gotten into the OMA DRM business. The company announced this week that Seacert, its trust management services subsidary, will be offering OMA DRM 2.0 trust services, including key material and certificates.
Intertrust built Seacert originally to provide trust services for implementers of Marlin, the DRM that Intertrust designed along with Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, and Sony. It claims over 20 current customers for this service.
Trust management services are necessary in any DRM implementation in order to provide a root of trust that guarantees the security and validity of encryption keys and other elements of security throughout the system. This is the case whether keys are distributed through physical means (as with simpler DRMs like CSS or CPRM) or through the network (like OMA DRM 2.0 or Marlin).
OMA DRM 2.0 is the much more sophisticated successor to OMA DRM 1.0. But while 1.0 is very widely installed, with a worldwide base of over half a billion devices, OMA DRM 2.0-based services are thin on the ground. Intertrust has had an interest in expanding the OMA DRM 2.0 market because it represents opportunities for the company to license its DRM patents. Its offering of trust management services should make it simpler for wireless carriers or third-party providers to launch actual content services based on OMA DRM 2.0.
The new offering also furthers Intertrust and its partners’ goal of improving interoperability between Marlin and OMA DRM 2.0. Marlin represents the DRM strategy of the “media player” axis in consumer electronics, while OMA DRM represents the DRM strategy of the “mobile handset” axis. Those two axes are obviously converging, with neither one gaining dominance over the other, so it makes sense to try to unify their respective DRMs. Accordingly, Seacert’s services provide a single source for keys and certificates across both technologies.
Intertrust has been offering licenses to its relevant patents to implementers of both Marlin and OMA DRM 2.0 under similar terms. Intertrust and Philips, together with CoreMedia of Germany, have developed a spec called OMArlin that enables interoperability between the two technologies; Seacert supports OMArlin now.
Full, seamless interoperability between the two DRMs should help improve experiences for users while also helping consumer electronics makers compete with the other important DRM technology in the mobile space: Microsoft’s PlayReady.
Bill Rosenblatt
Azita Arvani
Bill Jones
Niels Thorwirth
