e.Digital Corporation (fka EDIG)

[Tinroad]

IBM Solves Digital Music Distribution, But Is Anyone Listening?
By Sam Emerson; found by redfalcon2 at RB
http://www.mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=24405

For those of us who have been following the saga of digital music, it is always hard to sift through the noise that tends to rise from the playing field and find the true potential winner. As always, you have Microsoft and they will continue to be a force in anything software. You also have Real Networks’ who have seemingly flown beneath the radar with its DRM solution, but when actually revealed showed that that company has a ways to go to even catch up. The there is Intertrust who are only getting support, seemingly in vain from the record labels, but the system just isn’t very good. And finally, standing quietly there is “Big Blue”. When it comes to IBM it is not a matter of if you will do business with them, its when. Big Blue was the first to test a downloading system with the majors in the Madison project. If you ask the industry about it you get mixed opinions, but the fact of the matter remains that Big Blue has created possibly the ultimate DRM system and no one seems to care. This system has been labeled as EMMS or Electronic Media Management System, leave it to big blue to use a very obvious name, maybe the lack of an ultra-creative product naming scheme is at fault here. The philosophy behind EMMS is to allow content owners to use whatever CODECs, both audio and video that they may be comfortable with and wrap it with a secure, robust and very functional DRM. So companies with databases of say AAC files don’t have to transcode into another format and their content is secure and versatile, smart IBM, very smart. The DRM is so good in fact that sources close to the company say it will be applying this technology to the medical industry where strict privacy laws have been set in place without a good solution available in the market place. Back to entertainment, at the mastering side, there are almost too many options to place on content: Burn to a CD a specific number of times, super distribution, preview then buy, and the list goes on and on. With this system the hardest thing would be for the executives to decide which options they want. While this is all fine and dandy for the top of the food chain, what about the bottom where us consumers feed? This is an area I think almost everyone has forgotten about. Who wants to make sure you have the right application to play xyz DRM file, I just want to hit play and enjoy. This is where IBM discovered a diamond in the rough. You may have seen press releases regarding the licensing and product release of the Vedalabs Media Engine, from Vedalabs. While this is a terrible brand name to make stick in the consumer’s mind, the company actually intended for that. The company allows others to brand the application as their own. This makes Vedalabs a pure technology play because they are not competing to get a customer to upgrade for $29,95 or to buy from this store or that one. Vedalabs is a start up company that simply has gotten it right. They have built a product that supports multiple file formats, CODECs, DRMs, etc. for audio, video, and text. And best of all they have been quietly building a peer to peer system of secure file streaming and file transfer. They boast listening to your own music collection from home at work via streaming. And streaming technology works great for devices without large amounts of memory. Content providers should be all over this one, get content into the market place without huge costs in bandwidth because of this peer to peer system. If you read the press releases off of www.ibm.com and read between the lines, it starts to make sense. Vedalabs has built its media engine to support virtually all content and they are porting it to other platforms, the phone, set top box, etc. And quite frankly they could probably care less if it is IBM, Microsoft or whomever because they support them all, why pick a winner. All of a sudden, digital music is portable no matter what the format and users are not tied to their PC, why pay for a subscription service for PC listening only when there is plenty of web radio? But by having a client piece that operates and manages content across multiple devices there is convergence. And IBM has built a robust DRM solution. Together it is an incredible package that no other company has currently matched. So why haven’t they won? One reason is that they don’t even know what they have got in their hands. But, ultimately this war over digital music distribution was decided by the labels before it even started. With the recent defection of Napster, MP3.com and they myriad of failing start-ups, the labels have created an environment to control and slowdown this new music revolution because it just is not the right time. You see, the replacement of the CD is the DVD and formats such as Dataplay. Come on guys, it makes sense. Distribution is the key to a record label’s power, why give that up if that is how you put groceries on the table. Digital distribution ruins the current model in the label’s mind. Even though this could be no farther from the truth. The technology exists today from the likes of IBM and its partners, but the powers that be simply do not want it. The only consolation in this whole mess is that the consumers want it, and its just like in college when you wanted to tell the teacher who just gave you a “C” instead of a “B”, “Hey man, I pay your salary.” One day they will speak up and someone is going to listen.