Well it’s Digital Hollywood week in LA and perfect timing for Netflix to announce they are rolling out support for Macs using Silverlight with PlayReady DRM. This announcement is significant for a variety of reasons but the most important reason to take note of is the inevitable encroachment on Apple’s dominance as the sole provider of major studio content to the Mac platform.
For nearly 6 years now, Apple has enjoyed a complete monopoly on delivering pay media content to the Mac platform. Given this is less than roughly 18% of the consumer computers being sold but now that Silverlight has become a very viable and widely-deployed technology, it really is “Enter The Dragon” time in the Mac content wars.
It’s possible that the overwhelming amount of content that is getting ready to be available on the Mac platform may provide Microsoft and their content partners a big inroad into the Mac audience. Once Nokia and other handset manufacturers roll out their PlayReady compatible handsets, we may even see more tie-ins with the Mac and the PC that don’t exist today and were only pipe dreams in the PlaysForSure eco-system.
Christopher’s Parting Shot: One last note on this thread go check out www.smoothhd.com Akamai and Microsoft rolled out a new HTTP smooth streaming technology that uses HTTP servers instead of conventional Windows Media servers to deliver content. It’s quite stunning to say the least.
How does the World’s Largest Music Retailer blowup an online music store so easily? This past week we saw yet another company fall into the PR mess associated with shutting down a Windows Media Rights Manager license server. First it was MSN Music, then Yahoo Music and now Walmart has fallen prey to the press.
Tim Siglin at StreamingMedia.com provides some great coverage about Walmart’s initial intent to shut off their license servers for the very few users of their online music service.
Shortly thereafter, “based on overwhelming customer demands,” Walmart crawfished on this announcement with this email to their customers:
From: Walmart Digital Music
Date: October 9, 2008 10:57:11 PM CDT
Subject: UPDATE: Important Information About Your Digital Music Purchases
NOTE: This is a follow-up to our email titled “Important Information
About Your Digital Music Purchases” from 9/26/08.
Based on feedback from our customers, we have decided to maintain our
digital rights management (DRM) servers for the present time. What this
means to you is that our existing service continues and there is no
action required on your part. Our customer service team will continue
to assist with DRM issues for protected windows media audio (WMA) files
purchased from Walmart.com.
While our customer support team is available to assist you with any
issues, we continue to recommend that you back up your songs by burning
them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you insure
access to them from any personal computer at any time in the future.
We appreciate your support and patience as we work to provide the best
service possible to you. As we move forward with our 100% MP3 store,
we’ll continue to update you with key decisions regarding our service
and your account via email.
Thank you for using Walmart MP3 Music Downloads.
The Walmart Digital Music Team
From all the data available publicly, Walmart’s store was a distant follower to pretty much every other store out there. The bland operation and poor marketing of the site seemed to contribute to it’s failure. Walmart’s inability to create tangible tie-ins and vertical marketing vehicles with WMRM compatible PlayReady device manufacturers also left a big hole in their strategy.
I have always thought that someone should run a licensing inheritance service where you can turn over your license server to some 3rd party company to operate it in escrow. The end analysis of the legal issues around such an opportunity seem to put it out of consideration for now but the future might change with our laws as they relate to copyright and digital media.
For about 2 weeks now I have been getting phone calls and emails from people claiming that Entriq is possibly winding up as a business unit of Naspers or significantly tailing back the offering and company personnel. While we have been unable to confirm any of these rumors, we have been hearing significantly less from the company in the marketplace.
Last year they underwent significant cut-backs and headcount changes and even though they have a new website and branding presentation, it appears that the company is clearly undergoing some changes. After acquiring DayPort for $45M the company may leave many DayPort staff wondering if selling out was such a good idea.
After their COO was panned earlier this year for making some choice comments about consumers’ responsiblity to back up all their DRM-managed media, the company has been silent.
Again I have not confirmed any of these rumors and if you have information about this please email me directly. info@thedrmblog.com
If you noticed this past week some intermittent outtages of www.thedrmblog.com we apologize. Our hosting provider kind of left us hanging and so we have begun setting up some redundancy failover resources for the site. Thanks for being patient and continuing to read our blog.
