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The nearly 80 companies offering competing digital rights management technologies in the market are enough to make a content provider's head spin. So it isn't too surprising there's a move afoot to create a single, uniform open standard.
At a meeting last week in Pisa, Italy, the Moving Picture Expert Group-a working group of the international ISO/IEC standards organization-discussed a new standards addition dubbed Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP).
"That is about creating a standard for content protection that is interoperable," says Leonardo Chiariglione, executive director of the Secure Digital Music Initiative and an active member of the MPEG group.
That could be good news for consumers, who are limited in selecting content that matches the digital rights management system on their portable players.
"The same consumers cannot enjoy the two types of content unless he has two types of players," Chiariglione says. "This is not good for anybody's business. You could say it is good for people providing DRM solutions but that is not true because at this stage, the market is so fragmented, there is no business for anybody."
Work actually started on the standard in October, with about 15 technology submissions. The standard is expected to be approved in December, Chiariglione says.
"You don't need different players," he says. "What we want to provide the same user experience where people understand content is valuable, therefore content must be protected in order for them to get access to that. On the other hand, they don't want to deal with the problem of player one for content provider one, player two for content provider two. That doesn't work."
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