Intertrust has finally got one of the major cellular operators to buy into more than just its intellectual property for DRM, with a trial deal with Telef’nica and its subsidiary O2, announced this week.
Curiously enough Telefonica and its subsidiary were among the operators last week announcing that they would support Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM, so is it looking at both of the technologies in some kind of play off, to see which one it likes?
Well perhaps, but contrary to what we said last week, the new PlayReady DRM from Microsoft will also work on both Symbian and Linux handsets (and other clients) and Microsoft is offering porting kits to anyone that wants to explore this route (though not openly encouraging it).
Our understanding is that PlayReady can sit on PCs and the majority of content enabled handsets, and that means it can swap content between them, which is just what this announcement from Intertrust says its system enables.
Most digital media news services gave pride of place to the PlayReady DRM last week from Microsoft, whereas we barely mentioned it, instead we discussed the new Intertrust initiative to offer an OMA counterpart on the PC with its own DRM, along with a new licensing scheme.
But now that we look at it, it is both announcements together that create a dramatically significant movement on DRM. It’s just that we couldn’t believe what Microsoft had done until our enquiries confirmed that Microsoft is allowing PlayReady to work across all devices.
According to partner Packet Video, who helped Microsoft demonstrate the device at 3GSM, the software can also be ported to other operating systems including Symbian and Linux and it was indeed demonstrated on a Symbian phone.
So this really is a pitch to replace the OMA DRM standard that was so painstakingly worked out by the Open Mobile Alliance partners and which was hijacked by their failure to clear patent rights with intellectual property leaders in DRM, notably Intertrust and the Microsoft controlled ContentGuard.
Of course there remains a hitch. The IPR used in domain management (the ability to move content freely from device to device within the same home or group) and much of the encryption key trust management (how keys are safely moved around) belongs to Intertrust, and Microsoft painfully paid $440 million, after a four year court case, to license it. But it is only licensed for Microsoft operating systems.
So the Intertrust licensing deal is truly important, because a combination of licensing patents from Intertrust at a dramatically reduced rate, as well as getting a DRM that can work on a PC AND on all major operating systems for mobile handsets, is a huge step forward.
And one other change on the Microsoft front is that PlayReady is a DRM that works with open codecs like H.264, so the product announcement includes a concession that Microsoft has given up trying to use its DRM to exclusively push its own file formats (DRMs by their very nature should be file format agnostic).
So Telefonica have two potential routes forward, it can either use PlayReady and buy the new cheaper IPR license from Intertrust to allow it to use it beyond Microsoft platforms, OR it can buy Marlin, the Intertrust developed DRM to work on PCs and other devices, and stick to its OMA DRM (we think CoreMedia provides this) and have the two interoperate.
In the end DRM interoperability is always achievable even if it means using multiple DRMs, as long as the same operator controls all of the back end and the license and key servers. But it’s far easier with a single code base or an interoperable DRM client.
The system that Telefonica has announced is on trial allows Intertrust software to move content backwards and forwards to a PC from a handset, and a possibly even to an IPTV set top if it so chooses.
If Telefonica finds that the technology works well it could adopt the DRM system end to end in a quadruple play, effectively breaking the deadlock in interoperable digital rights management technologies. But the key issue is that it can go either way, either all Microsoft, potentially leading other operators there and creating the perfect future lock-in for Microsoft on DRM, and another software monopoly. Or it can adopt the Intertrust software alongside OMA. Either way Telefonica must license the DRM patents for its handsets, and that means some income for DRM specialist Intertrust.
Intertrust is owned by Sony and Philips and has amassed over 60 US patents and has more than 100 patent applications pending worldwide. It is one of the companies that is holding up the adoption of the Open Mobile Alliance’s DRM for mobile handsets, while it attempts to get an acceptable patent license agreed by all parties. Vodafone broke ranks in November 2005, bypassing the OMA patent pool to license the DRM intellectual property of Intertrust, but never went so far as adopting an Intertrust piece of software, instead relying on CoreMedia as its OMA DRM partner.
Intertrust has been pushing its own DRM software framework called Marlin, that is supposed to embody core interoperability elements for moving content from the protection of one DRM to the protection of another, without necessarily sharing keys and making the two DRM’s weaker.
We call Marlin a framework because it is like a Lego version of DRM, which can be snapped together to embody whatever requisite DRM features are required. Last week, as we mentioned, Intertrust released a new licensing scheme for OMA and for Marlin, dramatically lower in price than the OMA patent pool which is being run by MPEG LA.
At the time Intertrust CEO Talal Shamoon told us that the idea was to license Marlin for working on PCs, and any variation of OMA for the handset and to have content move freely between them. But this is also the aim of Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM announced at 3GSM last week, as well adding the ability of allowing content domains involving multiple devices and super distribution. We understand that Marlin already embeds both concepts, so it now looks like becoming a straight fight between these two approaches.
The statement from Intertrust said, ‘The purpose of the trial is to evaluate Marlin’s ability to provide consumer-friendly content services over mobile and fixed line services to mobile handsets, PCs and other consumer electronics devices and to evaluate interoperability between OMA DRM devices and other Marlin devices. The trial is scheduled to go live in Q2 2007.’
OMA DRM was the great white hope for creating a DRM across all handset platforms, but it took local technology licenses from Australia and Scandinavia in the hope that international patent licenses could be obtained for them. Later it emerged that Intertrust, Sony, Philips, Microsoft’s Content Guard and Matsushita all felt that their patents were essential to build an OMA DRM, and irked at the attempt to bypass their patents wanted to charge a high price for the technology. That virtually stalled the DRM market on handsets globally and a variety of DRM approaches have been tried by various operators, including one un-named operator commissioning Microsoft to build a bridge between Windows Media DRM and OMA, work that it delegated to CoreMedia, the German OMA specialist.
Now the new licensing scheme from Intertrust and the claimed interoperability between Marlin and OMA means that the OMA DRM may rise from the ashes once again. But PlayReady is far more likely a move for cellular operators, especially those that look forwards to a quadruple play.
Microsoft says that its PlayReady system, unlike Windows Media 10 DRM allows permanent copies as well as subscriptions, and files can be flagged as rental, pay-per-view or be based on ‘super-distribution’, which we take to mean allows a certain number of free plays using a temporary decryption key that expires. Playready is independent of file formats but out of the box supports Windows Media Audio, AAC and AAC+ and HE-AAC, Windows Media Video and H.264.