Microsoft's music DRM gets setback

THE VOLISH BEAST of Redmond's attempts to dominate mobile DRM received a setback after the Japanese manufacturer of the Rio MP3 player, announced its intention to cease production.

D&M Holdings, which is behind the Denon and Marantz audio brands said it would stop making the Rio by October [2005]. That just leaves Creative Technology with its Zen players as the major flagship for Windows based players.

The difficulties faced by consumers wanting to download music to a device other than Apple's iPod were highlighted recently by the INQ.

We discovered that there were almost no independent sites available to youngsters who owned an MP3 capable handset but no PC.

If their mobile network operator's portal didn't carry music from their favourite bands, they were stuffed. This is particularly true for 3 which operates a 'walled garden' in the UK. So outside sites are simply accessible.

The INQ also discovered that several music labels could accept payment for full audio tracks via Premium SMS (text) messages sent to the purchasers mobile phones.

The track, however, would be delivered to the purchaser's PC and protected by Microsoft's .wma DRM policies. There was then no guidance as to whether these files would actually play on a Windows compatible handset - like O2's XDA.

The loss of the Rio makes it more likely that the mobile phone industry's DRM 1.0 standard will therefore emerge as the true rival to Apple's Fairplay DRM (as used by iTunes). µ