“Hollywood is challenging the hegemony of Apple in digital distribution. A consortium of major studios — excluding key Apple ally Walt Disney Co. — is teaming up with leading retailers and consumer-electronics firms to essentially transform the paid download into an experience akin to buying a DVD. The goal is letting video purchased at any outlet be played on any device worldwide,” Andrew Wallenstein reports for The Hollywood Reporter.
“Known as the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the consortium brings together Warner Bros. Entertainment, Fox Entertainment Group, NBC Universal, Sony, Paramount Pictures and Comcast Corp. with retailer Best Buy along with tech giants Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Philips, Toshiba and Verisign. Each company has an invested an unspecified sum in the endeavor,” Wallenstein reports.
Wallenstein reports, “If DECE takes hold, it would institute several precedent-setting principles:”
• Participating devices and services will be interoperable regardless of differing brands or corporate provenance. A TV episode, for instance, could be just as easily accessed on Microsoft’s Zune as it would a Philips broadband-enabled TV set.
• DECE would allow an unlimited number of copies of a video to be created or burned onto a disc.
• The consumer would even have the option of not storing the copy at all, but rather streaming it from a server-based “rights locker” that can be tapped from any location.
• DECE would create open standards whereby any company that chose to create contents or services can do so to available specifications.
“‘While we haven’t yet had conversations with them about joining, we’d love to have them,’ said said Mitch Singer, chief technology officer at Sony Pictures and the lead architect of DECE, who added that DECE has reached out to Disney,” Wallenstein reports. “‘We’re going in a slightly different direction than Apple by offering more choice in terms of storefront and device.'”
Wallenstein reports, “DECE plans to announce a brand name and logo, as well as a more detailed plan, at the upcoming Consumers Electronics Show in January.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “KingMel,” “Martin” and “Grigori” for the heads up.]
Without Apple, DECE is likely to be a PlaysForSure rerun.
meh, w/o Apple DECE is as good as DECEased
There is no need for a consortium on this. The answer is simple: dump DRM. It doesn’t stop those who intend to steal content. All it does is hurt those of us who are willing to pay for content if it’s not a pain to get it. If you dump DRM, you can distribute content through open standards that can be played on any device.
They never learn?
That’s just kick-you-in-the-crotch, spit-on-your-neck squirt-tastic!
The next DRM……….SeinfeldGates. That mess with that and your computer will be playing those ads non-stop.
That’s just great! The asshat who gave us the Sony Rootkit malware controversy has cooked up yet another scheme to save the industry.
This is just more of the same from Mitch Singer, who joined SPE in 1990 as legal counsel and ever since he has been promoting his brand of DRM.
This man is anything but consumer-friendly and until we learn more about the policies and processes of Dee Cee, you can bet he’s working fast and furiously behind the curtain to get everyone on board.
Unfortunately, this his the potential to marginalize Apple’s leverage.
First it is questionable if that rogues gallery of organizations can ever successfully cooperate on anything as adventurous and consumer friendly as DECE.
If they do succeed however, it can blow the whole iTunes/iPod closed ecosystem out of the water.
It all depends on how they approach it.
Even if it really means, “buy once, play anywhere” on your WINDOWS MEDIA device, the iPod could be in serious trouble. Even if the media is DRM free, the mere fact that it will obviously be in Windows Media format will be screwed up for the iPod/Itunes world.
@Jay-Z is right. There is no need for a consortium if they really were concerned about consumers. The whole consortium thing is about destroying Apple’s dominance. Any such consortium that includes Microsoft would logically not include Apple.
I believe Thomas Hesse of Sony summed it up best when he said…
“Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” — National Public Radio November 4, 2005.
After all these years the “ecosystem” has been looking for ways to get back in the game. The horse is out of the barn. All they can do now is lay around the yard and lick each other.
“All they can do now is lay around the yard and lick each other.”
The Ballmer’s call that “Family Night.”
“Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE)”: a collection of losers that can’t beat Apple by themselves, so they get all their loser friends to help.
Just like ‘PlaysForSure’, Napster, or RealAudio, this has ‘Epic Fail’ written all over it.
Good luck with your loser friends, Mitch. Hahahaha.
@Jay-Z
You’re exactly right. DRM is the problem, not Apple.
You know what, fine. Let’s develop some way that a file can be played on any device and numerous copies can be made of it (just get rid of DRM?). Let’s do all that, and then let’s make sure the studios sell that content for whatever price they want — so long as that price is the same for each and every digital distributor (as in Apple).
Then, the battle is in how seamless the content is delivered and on how fantastic the hardware/software is (as in iPod/iPhone/iTunes).
I’ll bet you Apple looks pretty good in that situation and would embrace the hell out of it.
Problem is, the studios will never agree to across the board pricing because they want to pick who the winners are. They don’t want another iTunes on their hands. They’d rather have six different mediocre services that they can control than one that does a great job but has some leverage.
If I’m Apple, I just keep doing what I’ve been doing. Because the customers now know that Apple makes the best widget, and the studios will eventually come to accept it.
@thelonious Mac
How can they succeed, ever? 3/4 of the devices they talk about are iPods already.
They exclude Apple, and piss off 3/4 or their customers.
They include Apple, and piss off all of their customers.
Or do I miss some magical other video device?
It will be a Hulu venture all over again, this time it will just be Pay per view based rentals.
While Hulu started out ok on the video quality end they are still having scaling issues and to address the issues they are starting to reduce the video Quality by increasing the compression and reducing the original video size.
What’s Comcast to do now that they have put download caps in place for it’s customers. You know that they are going to be pushing hard for low bandwidth content for delivery. Of they exempt DECE content from the cap and not iTunes, YouTube, Podcasts or Bit Torrent their might be some unfair trade practices and collusion issues for investigation in the future of the DECE and Comcast.
DECE and even the Music Labels need to walk and start treading lightly in these joint online efforts. Collusion of price fixing and Collusion to damage a leading player in the market through price fixing, availability restrictions and some of the other games. Can make it appear that their conspiring to fix and raise Wholesale prices for Apple (by forcing Apple to keep DRM’d tracks at lower bit rate) while everyone else sells NON-DRM’s tracks at higher bit rates and I’m sure at lower wholes prices.
It needs to change, any one for a class action against the recording labels.
Does this remind anyone of the early Apple, Windows situation?
Microsoft is involved. They will never achieve their goal of “letting video purchased at any outlet be played on any device worldwide.”
Demon –
I still think hulu is the great thing in the world!!!!
Other then apple products that is
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A server based “rights locker”. Yeah, that’s what all the kids want!
On the one hand there’s some potential outcomes that sound good, on the other hand, how is it that anytime MS is involved everybody’s “on-board”, but Sun, Apple, Linux – It’s seen as a last resort, or in the case of iTunes meets with a lot of resentment. What’s up with that?
It sounds like this new group wants to create content for their own devices, whatever that ends up being, and I’m guessing the iPod is not going to be part of that ecosystem, and therefor the DECE probably doesn’t want to invite Apple because Apple already has a vested interest in the existing marketplace and the DECE doesn’t want their arm twisted to support the iPod. I’m sure that SJ gets this too.
Change every instance of ‘would’ to ‘could’ makes the article more accurate. Because everything is controlled by the copyright owner. They could let you have unlimited copies for your domain. They could let you download the content. It’s like what they are trying to do even to broadcast TV [disable unprotected HD outputs and DVRing for certain shows]. They want to get the method out there and accepted, then they can increase prices and decrease your permissions.
Oh God! Here comes the second push to make WMA and WMV “standards”. Dig deep into those pockets Mafia$oft like you did before in bribing the standards bodies to get WMV declared equivalent to h264 and their new XML formats an official “open” standard.
Just a thought—
Apple is taking a “wait and see” attitude. If these guys are for real, then they can join later. If these guys just want to “kill” Apple, then Apple just keeps making better than everyone products and has massive market share. So the Di ce system just dies on the table.
Its way too soon to join these people, wail until you see what they are really up to.
Period.
en
Does Apple really have to join this thing? All they really need to do is be a licensee and just add the format to their products. Does Apple really care if you can or can’t burn copies of the files and play them anywhere?
If I’m correct, Apple only has DRM on their files because of the content providers. It’s Apple’s choice of DRM that has all the other players in the media player market bummed. Either way Apple wins. Lets see how open they are to allowing Apple to use their format when it comes out.
It’ll probably come down to those guys trying to pressure Apple on price. That is if Apple decides to be a retailer as well as content consumer.
Reading between the lines leads me to believe that the intention is to create an end-to-end DRM system, where the enforcement is done at the hardware level. In this way the content providers can lock-out any hardware vendor that refuses to cooperate. Further it allows them to punish artists who refuse to cooperate by refusing to include them if they will not sign “work for hire” contracts.
Personally I consider any such consortium to be engaged by definition in “restraint of fair trade” and would hope that the courts will agree. OTOH, I doubt the courts or legislature will be so enlightened. Currently they fail to see that the continued insistence by the content providers that iTunes distribute protected content merely makes it impossible for other hardware vendors to compete with Apple without creating a similar distribution system. I suspect that the Zune would do much better in terms of hardware sales if the entire iTunes catalog were available to play on it, which would happen automatically if the tracks were DRM free.
My best hope is that the rise of digital distribution will convince new music and video artists to deal directly with the sales organizations (like iTunes) and put an end to the tyranny of “for hire” performance contracts.