If you haven’t heard yet, Microsoft has officially announced a release of their own version music and video player under Zune brand name. Product should become available sometime in Q4 of this year, probably just around Christmas.
In the past Microsoft has relied on partners (Samsung, iRiver and others) to create devices, other set of partners to offer music stores (Napster, Rhapsody, URGE, and others) and those efforts hardly made any dent at Apple’s dominant market share. It’s apparent that ‘closed garden’ model where a single service provider provides device, service and media protection (DRM) works lot better than a music eco-system built on components from multiple vendors.
Two key questions have surfaced:
1) Will Zune work with existing music stores?
2) Will it use same media and digital rights management technology?
There are no indications from Microsoft but anyone involved in digital media industry knows that attempting to reinvent the wheel and abandoning the technology that was built into all MS supported systems, and more importantly abandoning the partner eco-system built over several last years, would be equal to a suicide.
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How do you combat Apple iPod? Offer cooler features!!!
That is what Microsoft is attempting to do with their Zune player. According to the latest rumors Zune allows users to create mobile social networks and stream music up to four nearby friends or strangers. It’s called the DJ feature, it can be turned on and off and whether to stream to any nearby Zune user or only to people on their friends list. If the DJ setting is on, people don't need to do anything else to allow others to listen to their music. The music sent is the same as what the DJ is listening to; if they stop listening, the stream is interrupted.
Device supports both the 802.11b and 802.11g wireless standards. It also has a 30GB hard drive, a 3-inch screen and an FM tuner, along with a USB 2.0 connection to synchronize with a PC.
Drama continuous!!! Apparently device manufactures got a hint and took their own approach of paring their device with music stores to create a complete music ecosystem. Samsung enters into the online music store using MusicNet as media store provider along with three other hardware manufactures.
This signals that Samsung is determined to become a player in portable music player space and second one is that digital rights management (DRM) wars just got more entrenched. So how does Zune fits in here? Although I hate to be a rumor distributor, according to the latest rumors on the street, Zune will use DRM version that is slightly adapted to utilize new features of Windows Media Player 11. Working in DRM space for past 5 years this tells me that DRM 11 version is been readied by Microsoft and a home team got a first look at it. Some are cynic and talking about a whole new DRM system which is baseless and makes no sense in long-term. There will be new rules/rights and protection enhancements. Consequently, they might affect older content in certain ways that could keep it away from Zune device. Microsoft has been good at making things backwards compatible in the past and I don’t see a reason why would this change. Yet another rumor is that Microsoft will offer transfer capability of old content to Zune device which confirms the compatibility theory. It could though involve XrML (XML rights language) in the process to do this but I’m still firm believer that backward compatibility will be how it’s done. In the mist of latest DRM 10 circumvention I take this as no surprise that DRM 11 will have a slightly different engine to handle hacks, in particular balckbox (individualization/security upgrade) component.
Here is the great preview on Zune device and its capabilities. Click here to go to Engadget to check out video highlights of Zune.
So much has been written on Zune's ease of use, design, similarity and contrasts with Apple's iPod so I'm going to focus solely on DRM issues.
First and foremost, Zune player does not see PlaysForSure content and because it was designed on a "closed walled garden" principle, you are not able to sync or move PlaysForSure content onto device. There is a hack publicised by the Engaget that you can use to modify Zune's registry to achieve this but this is not something common users will ever take time to do as it's not as simple task as clicking on the button. That been said, it's apparent that Microsoft has taken trick out of Apple's bag and abandoned its partner program.
Henceforth, this could all change if a new DRM version that powers Zune is licensed to PlaysForSure store owners and they re-encrypt their media. However at that point all existing PlaysForSure players will become incompatible unless manufactures are able to come up with firmware upgrade.
On the other hand, the new DRM could be backwards compatible thus creating a win-win situation for all parties because no changes to existing devices would be needed!
Wanted to note that PlaysForSure content does play on Zune player!
If you are able to transfer content to the device, -- can't be done with Zune software -- it will play as long as you have a license with media usage rights allowing transfers/playback on portable device.
Neglected to mention that Zune Marketplace content can be played and synced to PlaysForSure devices with Windows Media Player (I used version 11) or just by dropping the content onto the device.
This proves the aforementioned concept of DRM compatibility or should I say use of same DRM with minor adjustments.
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