Thai developer POPidols has developed a mobile content management system called Symphony, which sounds like it covers all the bases these things need to cover — cross-licensing, tracking transactions, and DRM.
The thing that stood out for me in this story though is the following couple of paragraphs:
Another issue is that the existing flow of mobile content transactions means that the whole process is virtually unauditable. This structure can breed distrust between the licence holder and content provider.
“Licence owners normally impose hefty upfront fees to make up for what they believe to be eventual losses resulting from cheating by the content provider. So content providers with honest intentions get penalised because of the licence holder’s distrust and it makes it much harder for them to do business,” Pongrapee explained.
It doesn’t sound like a good way to do business, and I’ve heard from other people that the tracking of mobile content sales leaves a lot to be desired.
Symphony covers this problem (every transaction can be tracked and audited. All transactions are logged and can be seen by both content provider and licence owner at the same time and in real-time) and also complies with standards from international music labels such as EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music and Warner Music. “POPidols is now working with more than 20 content partners and over 100 content providers, offering more than 100 services through 10 telecom operators throughout Asia including AIS, DTAC, Orange, StarHub, Indosat, M1, Telkomsel, and Celcom”, and plans to add another four countries to its list.
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