Within 18 months, consumers will be able to buy consumer electronics devices and PCs which will permit them to share rich media content between devices in their digital home networks. With the arrival of interoperable digital rights management (DRM) technology, the consumer will also be able to share content with friends, legally.
According to a new report by independent market analyst Datamonitor titled “Digital rights management: selecting the key influencers of a nascent market,” Digital Rights Management in its most complete form will manage the rights of a piece of rich media content throughout its lifetime thus enabling ‘super-distribution’ in which a consumer is an end-user as well as a node of distribution.
Datamonitor expects the availability of such technology to spur the deployment of home wireless networks. While the majority of these systems are currently used to share broadband connections or wirelessly access the Internet, Datamonitor expects that by 2009, 23 million of them in the Europe will be used to exchange audio/video content – boosted by the lower prices of networkable consumer electronics devices and improvements in Digital Rights Management.
Today much of the work on Digital Rights Management is focused on copy protection, from the RIAA and MPAA trying to sue consumers and outlaw peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, to placing software onto music CDs which prevent consumers from legally copying songs to their PC. But basic copy protection solutions are only one part of a DRM solution.
Digital Rights Management in its most complete form will manage the rights of a piece of rich media content throughout its lifetime. The end-game is to enable ‘super-distribution’. In super-distribution a consumer can share, and/or pass-on, content to other devices or friends, with the rights passing with the content and the friend being charged if it is premium content.
Consumers using this rights management technology in future will be able to watch a film, legally copied from a DVD and sent wirelessly to, say, their laptop or PDA. They may also be able to send content to a friend’s PDA or email address, with a billing system seamlessly handling any necessary payment to the content owner. With this as the end goal, it is easy to see the significance that interoperable Digital Rights Management will have on consumers, manufacturers and content owners/distributors.
Datamonitor senior analyst James Healey, the author of the report has told radioinfo: “It should come as no surprise that all the big name technology vendors and manufacturers are heavily investing in this market. Apple and Microsoft, due to their online music format dominance, will play leading roles, but so too will Philips, Thomson and Sony. The leading intellectual property holders, ContentGuard and InterTrust, are likely to find their patents inside almost every DRM-enabled device that is sold.”
“At present, consumers are wary of copy protection solutions and phrases such as ‘rights management’. Partly because of their interest in free content, and partly because they do not want to be unfairly limited in what they can and can’t do with content they have bought. A system, in which a consumer is an end-user as well as a node of distribution, will require content owners and distributors to radically re-think their marketing plans. It will also offer the consumer more freedom to do what they want with their content, where to do it and when.”
Healey believes there will need to be consolidation and interoperability between competing systems of rights management which are currently around.
“If one CE manufacturer uses one DRM system, and another a competing solution, the two devices will not be able to share content and consumers will be unhappy – as with Apple’s iPod and songs from other online music stores using Windows Media Audio format,” says Healey.
Developments in DRM technology should be closely watched by radio people, who will more and more find themselves having to manage and pay for music and talk content which is being broadcast, streamed and podcasted in the digital environment.