Adrian Letts, ex-head of Content Global at Vodafone, and now director of a new ‘hush hush’ video distribution start-up called Blinkbox, has said that one of the biggest barriers to mobile content adoption has been the lack of consistency on operating systems and DRM.
“It’s not necessarily a bad thing that Microsoft has dominated the PC world,” he said. “It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have full interoperability on handsets, and Microsoft OS on all handsets makes it easier.”
Perhaps revelling in being abe to speak, free from the corporate shackles of Vodafone, Letts, speaking at a round table organised by End2End, said that the fact that operators offer different file formats for PC and mobile dual downloads is also “ludicrous”. Confusion over DRM just adds to the complexity, he added.
But Tom McLennan, manager of Vodafone music, said, “From an operator and handset vendor point of view, if you give Microsoft the keys to DRM, you potentially lose control of what’s happening on the handset.”
Patrick Parodi, representing the Mobile Entertainment Forum, said, “From a price point of view, Janus is cheaper to get out of the door than OMA DRM is today. But unless you have interoperability [between the different DRM systems] you’re not going to have growth of mobile content.
The mobile industry looked like it was going to get behind OMA DRM, but that got tied up in licensing issues with patent representative MPEG LA. That left many operators plumping for proprietary solutions, including SDC and Microsoft’s DRM.
McLennan said that OMA 2.0 repesented a “new opportunity” for operators to develop a new business model.
“OMA 2.0 enables a subscription and rental sales model and in terms of the complexity of the rights objects and management is far in advance of OMA 1.0,” McLennan said.