Media industry giants, including tech leaders Toshiba, Microsoft, Philips, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco and others, and media groups Warner Bros. Entertainment, Fox Entertainment Group, NBC Universal, Paramount Pictures, Lions Gate Entertainment Group, Fox Entertainment Group, Comcast and Sony, are working on changing the digital entertainment experience for customers.

The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) aims at improving the digital media experience for customers by extending the availability of purchased media content on a large array of devices and websites. Although more details are yet to be unveiled, the media and tech giants are trying to establish a set of rules that would allow customers to play paid content on any device.

“When we start bundle these digital rights together, we believe we can actually develop and deliver a product to the consumer that’s better than free,” Mitch Singer, chief technology officer at Sony Pictures and lead architect of DECE told Reuters.

If DECE will indeed have strong position in the digital industry, we should see an unprecedented interoperability between devices and services, as well as a freedom of use for customers who’ve purchased digital content.

What this means is that once you’ve purchased a movie for example, you should be able to play it on any type of device, or stream it according to your own wishes. That would indeed represent a big step ahead, considering the current limitations customers have to face when playing digital content.

Although Apple seems to have a lot to lose if such a system would be implemented, its position regarding DECE still remains unclear. “While we haven’t yet had conversations with them about joining, we’d love to have them,” Singer also said. “We’re going in a different direction than Apple by offering more choice in terms of storefront and device.”

Apple digital purchases currently limit playing the content to certain Apple devices, and limits access from a small number of computers. Talk about a different direction…