[by James Pearce]
The biggest news I came across at CTIA was SanDisk releasing some mobile content (sort of, we’ll come to that). Before last CTIA the memory-chip company had indicated it was interested in producing DRM-enabled flash cards, and today it announced its first customer. The Rolling Stones and their record label EMI launched the Stone’s last album “A Bigger Bang” on the card which will be available in November. Apparently the card will also contain songs from previous albums which can be “unlocked” through extra payments as well as bonus content such as artists pictures. The price? $39.99…yeah, we laughed too. But I figure the Rolling Stones have a pretty solid fan base who are now old enough to have good jobs, they’re kids have left home, and there was probably a lot of thought gone into the price point. The card was branded “gruvi”…I’m not sure who has that brand but I’m guessing EMI.
OK, that’s the example. The card uses TrustedFlash, which SanDisk decribed as a technology platform rather than a technology format, I think indicating that it would consider licensing the technology. The details are that the card has DRM built into it, and it can be any DRM or even mulitple DRM. So, assuming Apple was happy with it, you could put Fairplay and Microsofts DRM and whatever you want onto the same card and sell it. You can buy content and download it onto the card and it is DRM protected, but your own content goes into a seperate space and is unprotected. The big bonus of course is that the content can be moved to any device…well, not loaded onto the device but accessible from the device.
SanDisk has got some wildly big plans with this, but CEO Eli Harari got a little defensive when questioners asked him to elaborate on exactly how some of them would be achieved…”A lot of this is a work in process, we’re not coming down off a mountain with the Ten Commandments”.
One of the things SanDisk are interested in using the cards for is shifting subscription services. For example, a customer of Yahoo Music could load songs onto the chip, which includes Yahoo’s DRM technology. They can then listen to their music through any device with an appropriate card slot and MP3 player, but the DRM keeps checking whether the subscription is still valid and when it isn’t — no more music. The ability could also be included to update your service from that device if it runs out.
Of course, the idea is to have more content than music on the card, also video, games and so on. Which of course brings up the question of device fragmentation…
“That’s why music is a real easy one because compatability is really straight forward,” SanDisk product marketing manager David Guidry told me later. “Video is going to be a real challenge because of different screen sizes and codecs and so on. Games are going to be even more difficult, so that could be tied to a particular handset or something…there’s a lot of things that still have to be worked out.”
Our CTIA/MES coverage is sponsored by Motricity: Booth 717.
Subscriber content
?
Subscriber content comes from Gigaom Research, bridging the gap between breaking news and long-tail research. Visit any of our reports to learn more and subscribe.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments have been disabled for this post