Can Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM Technology Kick-Start Mobile Content On The Move?
Microsoft certainly thinks so. Tech Digest features an interview with Jim Alkove, Microsoft’s Senior Director Technical Strategy, who puts the DRM scheme into perceptive. Much of the interview reads as a primer on the technology, but it’s valuable to have straight answers from the source. PlayReady, which is referred to an an access technology,” supports a range of business models, including subscriptions, rentals, purchases, pay-per-view and preview, for a wide variety of content types well beyond music and video. It will be available in the first half of this year for device implementations, and Alkove expects “we
Microsoft is clearly launching a rival solution of OMA DRM 2.0. There is indeed a space for a new standard as OMA 2.0 has so far failed to become the new mobile DRM paradigm.
The beauty of OMA 2.0 (security) is also it's Achille's heel: while OMA DRM 1.0 is offering a limited security level, OMA DRM 2.0 has been designed with 2 constraints in mind: (i) strong security with a PKI mechanism based on the exchange of keys between the DRM agent and the DRM server and (ii) interoperability/trust based on a Root Certificate (eg the operator) that warrants the whole security tree. Although CMLA has defined the way PKI should be implemented and how interoperability should work between a mobile and a server, handset makers have so far failed to implement this new model into their devices (only a handful number of devices are on the market).
PlayReady does not however brings much value to the market in terms of business case: the "domains" feature is also part of OMA 2.0 and I don't see specific features that would outpace OMA DRM 2.0 in terms of flexibility. The fact that PacketVideo has already integrated PlayReady into its mobile player is however a sign that Microsoft move is a significant news on the mobile DRM market.