Intertrust couldn’t resist firing off a few shots this week to us about the Microsoft PlayReady initiative, which it says quite simply Isn’t Ready.
Intertrust holds strong DRM patents, and announced the first major trial for its long awaited Marlin DRM system last week with Telefonica, which it says has built in OMA interoperability. We pointed out that in last week’s issue Telefonica is also saying it is going to be a customer for PlayReady and that it was playing one off against the other.
But the Intertrust management, specifically CEO Talal Shamoon, normally circumspect and not given to open Microsoft bashing said, ‘This is just a market overhang strategy. Microsoft wants the world to think that this is a viable candidate to replace OMA as the DRM of choice for mobile operators, but there is no interoperability test suite issued with PlayReady as there is with Marlin, and the Microsoft pricing is not worked out.’
Shamoon also confirmed that anyone that licensed PlayReady for a non-Microsoft platform would still have to pay for a license to use the underlying patents. Microsoft acquired licenses for from Intertrust only after a bitter four year long legal battle.
‘The whole idea of .NET is to get a little piece of Microsoft everywhere, and in PlayReady it has just copied the domain model idea from us. We introduced that idea at the 2005 3GSM,’ Shamoon added. The domain model he is talking about is a set of techniques for allowing content to be spread around a home or among a group of friends, without allowing it to be copied unencrypted to the open internet. This has been put forward as a way to get the wider customer less worried about having digital rights management mechanisms in their content systems.
‘Marlin is a completely agnostic platform, we have the published specifications, the code and people are using it. It is an open standard that people can use with any codec. This is not the case with PlayReady, and we are not out to protect an operating system monopoly. The major operators realize what’s going on with PlayReady and we don’t think they will buy into it,’ Shamoon concluded.
The fight here is over a standard way to move content to and from PCs, MP3 players and mobile handsets, a facility that is going to be needed over the next few years, and one which Apple currently looks set to dominate with Fairplay.
A cellular DRM was specified by the Open Mobile Alliance over two years ago, but it has not been widely adopted because licensing costs from a patent pool that included the partly Microsoft-owned ContentGuard, as well as Intertrust and its parents, were deemed by the GSM Association to be astronomically high. The OMA DRM would have become the ‘lingua franca’ of content if it could have been widely distributed on the ubiquitous mobile handset.
Two weeks ago Intertrust decimated the licensing for its own technology patents including many of the relevant rights for OMA DRM as well as for its Marlin home grown DRM system.
We are invited, by the recent low pricing by Intertrust, to draw the conclusion that Microsoft was the ingredient in the discussions that drove the OMA licensing costs sky high, by its control of ContentGuard (which it holds with Time Warner and Thomson and who’s control was the subject of a European Commission investigation). It would appear that if Intertrust is willing to license its considerable patent rights for about a tenth of what the patent pool wanted, then it must have been Microsoft that was driving the patent pool pricing up, in order to sabotage OMA DRM.
We are invited to draw that conclusion, but it’s hard to be certain, as the stakes everyone is playing for are control of content movement from device to device.
Microsoft, after all, has already given away its DRM, for around 10 years, bundled into its Windows Media 10 player, which has established a beachhead from which it can attempt domination of content movement on the handset. That makes the use of PlayReady sound compelling for many operators who worry less about Microsoft dominance and more about their own cost structure. But only if the product works and is ready.
Microsoft cannot foster another round of disappointment similar to the one its IPTV system created. It has never quite come to market bug free despite Bill Gates personally visiting the CEO’s of various Telcos the world over and vouchsafing the system’s merits, before it was even written. Telcos will be wary of buying into another Microsoft product that doesn’t yet exist.
Perhaps what Intertrust needs to do is to give away its Marlin software for PCs and only sell the tools that will allow it to interoperate with a handset. That at least might give it a comparable installation base to Microsoft. But Intertrust says that there is movement in the PC to handset DRM battle and that major pieces on the board, such as some of the senior cellcos, are about to begin making commitments. We will, as always, watch this space.