PlayReady
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PlayReady is a Digital Rights Management (DRM) product from Microsoft for portable devices. It was announced in February 2007[1] and is oriented primarily to the mobile market. The main differences relative to previous DRM products from Microsoft are:
- Some popular features that were already present in other DRM products in the market have been added; a good example is the concept of domain (group of devices belonging to the same user which can share the same licenses).
- It is intended to be platform independent: unlike other Microsoft DRM products like Janus, PlayReady can be ported to any kind of portable device, even if it uses non-Microsoft technology (OS, codecs, media player, etc). This is probably the most significant change.
PlayReady seems to be Microsoft's response to other proprietary solutions (most notably Apple's FairPlay, which may enter the mobile phone market through the iPhone) and also the pure standard approaches that are struggling to become dominant in the market (e.g. OMA DRM). With respect to the latter, Microsoft claims to offer PlayReady free from the IPR conflicts that are slowing down the universal adoption of standard solutions as OMA or Marlin (although this is still to be confirmed, as the licensing that Microsoft got from Intertrust IPR is limited, specially for non-Microsoft OS devices). Not surprisingly, the extremely high price of the OMA license came partially from the high IPR claims from ContentGuard, controlled by Microsoft.
Microsoft expects massive presence of PlayReady-enabled devices in the market for 2008. In practice, the adoption of this DRM by the retail market seems to be slow. A notable exception is the Nokia announcement in summer 2007 that their high end devices will support PlayReady.
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[edit] Alternatives
There are several solutions in the market with a similar scope. Apart from the OMA DRM and Apple's FairPlay mentioned above, other DRM initiatives include Marlin, an open DRM (published specs) based on Intertrust IPR.
[edit] Interoperability
PlayReady is a pure proprietary solution and therefore will not be compatible with any non-Microsoft solutions. With respect to the other MS DRM products:
- PlayReady is backwards compatible with Windows Media DRM 10 content, meaning that content encrypted with WM DRM 10 (for instance, content for PlaysForSure devices) will play on a PlayReady terminal.
- PlaysForSure compliant devices won't play a PlayReady content.
- Zune is incompatible.
