What do Warner Bros. Entertainment, Best Buy, Toshiba, Sony, Comcast, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, NBC Universal, and Paramount Pictures have in common? They’re all being marginalized by Apple, that’s what. But more on that in a minute. The more practical connection these companies share is that they are forming an alliance under the banner of Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem; a video-centric successor to DRM. The catchphrase? ‘Buy once, play anywhere.’ Has a Utopian ring to it, doesn’t it?
The claims being staked by DECE representatives are that users will be able to access a “virtual library” of purchased videos that they can then transfer to any device. Makes sense, except for the whole deployment issue. DECE has merely defined itself in name, nothing more. Such a project would presumably take years to roll out. As Nate Anderson notes over at Ars Technica: “Without even a spec in place, there’s no way we will see working products for at least a year, quite possibly longer…By the time video stores adopt the tech, electronics firms implement it, movie studios support it, and consumers purchase all the pieces to make it work, will it still matter?”
What’s even more cause for concern is the lack of the little apple among the coalition of corporate logos. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes on his ZDNET blog Hardware 2.0 talks about the online media market ratio and its 70/30 split favouring Apple: “What this means is that all the other players (that is, everyone signed up to DECE) is fighting it out trying to make a sub 30% market share go further. Looking at things this way and it’s clear to me that what DECE really represents is a consortium of companies that have banded together in an effort to grab back some market share from Apple rather than fight for the spoils left over.”
Factor in the weak language used in the DECE announcement, such as “we are developing,” “over time,” not to mention the track record of nearly every company involved to simply label their own brand of poison rather than developing a cure, and it sounds like a case of the new boss being just like the old boss. Utopian indeed…
