Media Wonk

Digital's Compatibility Problem - August 18, 2008

By Jennifer Netherby: 

CinemaNow's announcement today that it is moving to an open DRM platform, making its movie and TV downloads playable on PCs, Macs and a broader range of consumer electronic devices seems to finally acknowledge one of the biggest problems for the movie download business: incompatibility.

While letting consumers watch anywhere, anytime has become the new industry mantra, in the movie download world, DRM restrictions make it nearly impossible because nothing works together. If you have a Mac, you can buy iTunes downloads and play them on your computer or iPod or the AppleTV. If you have a TiVo, you can download movies from Amazon that can also be played on a computer, but only if you have a PC. You can't transfer that download to your iPod and you can't transfer your iPod download to your TiVo. 

It would be as if you bought a DVD at Wal-Mart that would only play on your Wal-Mart DVD player but wouldn't play on a Sony player. No one would go for it.

But unlike in the physical world where studio and consumer electronic industry cooperation led to DVD being the fastest adopted technology and convinced the industry of the need for one format on high definition, there doesn't seem to be any broad push for a universal format or compatibility in the digital world.

I often hear from studio execs that they don't want Apple to be the next Wal-Mart, with enough market share to dictate to them. The download business is still negligible, but right now Apple has an even bigger stranglehold on digital than Wal-mart has on DVDs and it faces much less competition. And the competition is continuing to drop off.

While ad-supported and streaming video and VOD seem to be drawing bigger audiences, Apple has proven there is some interest in downloading movies and TV shows.

But until there's broad playback and support for downloads, why should consumers buy?

Not only are you limited in where you can play the download you bought or rented for the same price as a DVD, what happens when the retailer you bought your download from goes out of business? Your download is obsolete, which is what happened when Wal-Mart closed its download service and as it did when Google killed its service. The same has been true on the music side, most recently with Yahoo!

The music business solution to all of this has been to do away with DRM altogether. A couple months ago, I spoke with eMusic head David Pakman who's been pushing the studios (so far unsuccessfully) to drop DRM from TV show downloads and eventually movie downloads. He says the video industry should learn from music's mistake in limiting playback, which he believes only drives consumers to illegal downloads.

DRM is "an anti-consumer point of view that doesn't really live in reality," he said.

EMusic is staying out of video until that changes, and Pakman says others likely will also.

But those I've spoken to in the digital video world don't seem to think studios will drop DRM.

Instead, companies seem to be moving to an open format. CinemaNow with Widevine, while Dell is also said to be working on a broad open standard with Apple rivals to compete in the entertainment space.

Which I guess helps, but until those downloads are also playable on iPods and most other devices that play digital content, is it enough?

-- Jennifer Netherby

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