When a UK start up cellular handset music service begins to make a splash at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, you know that it’s more or less made it onto the international stage.
Omnifone’s MusicStation has already won a lot of plaudits, none so far in the US, for the imaginative way it has taken on iTunes and Nokia Music Store and turned the head of both Vodafone and Sony Ericsson, who offer the service, but at CES it was putting its weight behind an in-car entertainment system called CarStars, which won a CNET ‘Best of CES’ award.
CarStars is a collaboration between Gracenote, Voxonic and Omnifone and creates a dynamic user interface tailored to a driver’s specific tastes while also providing unlimited access to millions of music tracks, direct-to-vehicle, using embedded Gracenote technology.
The key behind this service is the Omnifone vision for music, which makes a collection of songs available across multiple devices including in-home and mobile devices as well as set-top boxes, digital TV’s, in-home entertainment systems, connected car stereos, mobile phones and desktop PCs. Though we’re not quite sure yet what a ‘connected’ car stereo is, unless its connection is cellular.
The partnership between Gracenote and Omnifone was also announced at CES, and although they have given out no details of how the system works right now, we know the music remains DRM protected throughout, so we know that none of this is simple.
Gracenote was sold to Sony in April last year for $260 million, and it retains a huge fingerprint database of most music along with multiple different copies of the same tracks. What appears to be happening here is that instead of coping with the vastly difficult issue of handing over copies of music files from handset to PC to set top, the Omnifone service is simply identifying which songs are on each device, and since the customer has already paid for a copy, servers can offer all of a person’s devices the same music.
We spoke to Tim Hadley Director, Corporate Communications at Omnifone and he said, ‘If you decide to have your music on multiple devices, you don’t want to have to sync your handset with your PC. What we do is send the tracks in an appropriate form to both your handset and your PC, taking into account the quality of the device they are going to be played on and the quality of the connection to that device. This way you might get a lower bit rate copy of the music on your handset, and a higher bit rate version on your PC or in-car system.’ There are some huge differences now in the footprint of various audio codecs. MP3 is a fine format for say PCs, but it creates files which are 8 times as large eAAC+, so MusicStation defaults to eAAC+ when it downloads across a cellular network to a handset.
Omnifone came to prominence when it announced MusicStation and signed a number of major cellular operators to the service. It’s a $3 a week all you can eat music service with millions of tracks available. Since then the company has gone on to launch MusicStation Max, a version of the service for cellular handset manufacturers. This is designed to go up against Nokia’s Comes with Music, and tries to go one better. Not only can any other handset vendor decide to bundle free music for a period (6 months to 18 months) into the price of the device, but the service can now be spread across multiple devices, and like Nokia’s service, some music can be kept DRM free at the end of the subscription.
In some cases, such as at Telenor, the two can be mixed and matched, with Telenor signing up for the music service across its entire range of phones, and Sony Ericsson in Sweden offering the service under the name PlayNow Plus (confusingly similar to the PlayNow Arena services which Sony Ericsson sells outside of Sweden which it created from its own Connect music service, which like iTunes is used to sell tracks for permanent ownership). Telenor offers free music only for 6 months and then asks for a monthly fee.
When your contract comes to an end with MusicStation you get to designate how many tracks you can retain. If you have had a 6 month subscription it will be 100 tracks, right the way up to 300 for an 18 month service. This is very similar to the Nokia Comes with Music service, ‘Except for one thing, says Hadley, ‘If you move from a Nokia device with Comes with Music, your music doesn’t follow you because it is DRM protected and tied to the device. When you move phones with MusicStation you get to carry your DRM free songs with you to your next device and on to the other devices you own.’
Although the company does not explain how this works, it sounds remarkably like the Intertrust NEMO architecture (Networked Environment for Media Orchestration), where the network itself takes intelligent decisions about whether or not it is okay to swap DRM keys and copies of encrypted files or if another service which uses a different DRM, needs to send a device a new copy. That platform has been around for four years and no-one publicly owns up to using it, but it is a method of creating what appears to be interoperable DRM systems).
The clue is that the device has to have interconnectivity so each device needs to be able to reach out to a network and request a copy of the music that it is supposed to have synced with another device, such as a phone, and somehow communicate that it belongs to ‘an identity’ which has rights to specific music. Obviously this is a lot easier if the devices are just registered as having strong enough DRM, and there is an unlimited subscription model at work, since every registered device is allowed to have any track. But there still needs to be identification data passed to each device, and although it may not actually identify an individual, it has to say ‘I want the same music a handset X and set top Y.’
‘It’s the same,’ said Hadley, ‘if you are a pre-pay customer and decide that you cannot afford to pay for the MusicStation service one month. When you sign up again maybe two weeks later, all of your tracks are recorded on the server and you can take up where you left off. Much the same happens when you lose your phone, a new phone can be given all the same tracks, playlists and can begin syncing with the same devices.’
It’s not too surprising that this won an award, because this is tricky technology, and makes it look like there just is NO DRM, which is the definition of good DRM ‘ like a good referee in a soccer match ‘ nothing bad (like piracy) happens, and you just don’t notice he’s there.
Another big problem that Omnifone appears to have solved is this issue of having different music formats, and different data rates, depending upon the device it is targeting. Not only does it need a huge database of prepared copies of all music formats, file sizes and storage footprints but it has had to create something it calls a Device Adaptive Architecture, which is a set of porting tools for layering the music into every format type in a best fit for each device. That’s how the Telenor and Vodafone services can offer music across as large a footprint of devices as the operator chooses.