Can Microsoft win the media format war?
Published: 04 Feb 2003 17:05 GMT
Music and technology companies have been moving toward including "second session" content on compact discs for years. Early experiments often included multimedia content such as games or videos, often in Apple's QuickTime format. In the last several years, record labels have been adding Web links, videos and other promotional material, although such content remains the exception rather than the rule.
However, as labels have increased their interest in copy protected CDs, they have increasingly looked to this second session as a way to ameliorate consumer concerns. Providing digital tracks that can be transferred to a computer, copied to an MP3 player, and ultimately even burned onto a CD will disarm critics who say copy protection eliminates consumers' flexibility to use their own music, the labels say. For at least the last year, the leading technology companies working on copy protection, including Macrovision and SunnComm Technologies, have already been planning to use the Microsoft Windows Media format for this second session content. Many CD production facilities have already installed technology for adding Windows Media Audio files to CDs.
As a result, Microsoft's toolkit falls into an industry already heading Redmond's way. What it may potentially change is vendor relationships. Labels had already been working with the technology companies such as Macrovision for the full copy protection package. Now they could theoretically split their attention, buying the basic copy protection technology from companies like Macrovision, and the second session media technology from Microsoft.
Deciphering Microsoft's motives is not as easy as during the so-called browser wars, when the software giant used exclusive contracts and hard ties between Internet Explorer and the Windows operating system to crush rival Netscape Communications.
For one thing, there is nothing totally exclusive about the DRM toolkit giveaway. Music labels would use the technology to create a second session on a CD, containing DRM-protected music pre-ripped in Windows Media Audio format, lyrics, album art and other extras. The first session, conforming to the usual standard, would be unaltered by the process.
In fact, consumers would still be able to rip music from a CD's first session into an MP3, which wouldn't do much to curb file trading. But used in conjunction with first-session content protection from Macrovision or SunnComm, Microsoft's second session would provide labels with a way of offering limited copying of the music. The technology also could resolve a common problem of first-session protection preventing CDs from playing on Windows PCs.
"One of the things Microsoft is really panicked about is Sony, among others, releasing these CDs that just can't be played in PCs," Rosoff said. "Microsoft, definitely, definitely doesn't want that to happen, so they have to present some kind of alternative."
Microsoft is betting the DRM and extras, like Windows Media Audio's support for 5.1 surround sound will appeal to record labels and consumers.
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