e.Digital Corporation (fka EDIG)

[Tinroad]

DataPlay on Tom's Hardware:
(Courtesy of g_adolf @ RB)
http://www6.tomshardware.com/smoke/01q2/010403/smoke-01.html
DataPlay - It's Small, But Hard

How would you feel if digital content security was specifically tied to the media itself? Don't baulk. It's already the case with a lot of PC games, certainly with Nintendo cartridges on N64 and Game Boys, DVD, and there's an interesting twist from a company called DataPlay. DataPlay has developed an optical disk, closer to a DVD in technology terms, competitively a descendant of CD-ROM, physically an endomorph in the same vein as CompactFlash, and priced at around $6-7 for a five pack. Not to far off, it will cost cents to buy, and produce Gigabytes of storage. So, the vendor hopes.

I got a chance to talk to Ray Uhlir, vice president of marketing for DataPlay who had this say, "Our main value proposition is we are a universal media that is portable for every digital device."

Actually he had a lot more to say, but that's the quote I'll use because, it's the main reason why I like the DataPlay approach - the media is the thing. Media is the future of digital content protection, and it has absolutely nothing to do with a hard disk. Hard disks are not a lot of fun, or easy to port. They're expensive, and unwieldy, and not standardized. They're mostly stuck in PCs, too.

I held a DataPlay disk in my hand, it looks like a quarter in a jewel case, and had an epiphany. 250 MB single sided, or 500 MB double sided storage. The drive is licensed by DataPlay to third party manufacturers, and the company hopes to make money on the sales of the actual disks. You store eBooks on it (can hold about 500 novels), or MPEG4 video, about two hours worth of a movie. It's lower resolution than MPEG2, but it might be playing on a small 320x240 pixel screen on a handheld so, it's good enough. It may hold games for handhelds. It may be in a portable audio player, which connects to your PC through a USB cable, which acts as a disk drive for DataPlay disks for your PC audio, or data files. Hmmm. Like the sound of that. We'll all have file sharing parties where we pop DataPlay disks.