Microsoft and Nokia have announced a partnership which will focus on including the Redmond giant’s PlayReady technology into Nokia S60 and Series 40 mobile device platforms.
The two behemoths (Nokia has a market capitalization of more than $116 billion while Microsoft is valued at more than $271 billion) extend their existing collaboration with this new agreement, which aims to offer content owners a more flexible and secure access to their potential clients in the increasingly large mobile phone market.
Microsoft PlayReady, unveiled at this year’s 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, is a new DRM technology that allows people to share protected pieces of content between mobile phones, PCs and other devices.
According to Chadd Knowlton, general manager for content access and protection at Microsoft, PlayReady allows customers to purchase content through the DRM-protection system and then transfer it to other domain-registered devices. Alternatively, a user could download the content multiple times to each device. Besides Nokia, Telefonica Spain, Britain’s O2, France’s Bouygues Telecom, Cingular Wireless/AT&T and Verizon have signed PlayReady-implementation agreements with Microsoft.
According to Microsoft, PlayReady's focus is music, video, games, ringtones, and images for distribution via subscription, rental, and other commercial means. PlayReady will also be backwards compatible with Windows Media DRM 10, which will enable mobile phones to play DRM-protected content from online stores that make use of the PlaysForSure (another DRM technology crafted at Redmond).
“People are increasingly using their mobile devices for enjoying digital content, such as music, games, videos and photos,” said Ilkka Raiskinen, senior vice president of Multimedia Experiences at Nokia. “By adding support for Microsoft PlayReady technology, we are enabling service providers to offer a wide range of content and create truly compelling experiences across mobile devices, personal computers and online services. We plan to support PlayReady across a range of S60 and Series 40 devices starting in 2008.”
“Through our collaboration with Nokia, we aim to deliver a compelling platform that offers consumers seamless access to virtually any type of digital content they want,” said Amir Majidimehr, corporate vice president of the Consumer Media Technology Group at Microsoft. “Nokia’s breadth of offering in this space, coupled with core digital media technology from Microsoft in the form of PlayReady, will bring new mobile entertainment scenarios to life for millions of consumers around the world.”
Microsoft’s PlayReady technology supports a range of business models that can be applied to a wide range of audio and video formats (including Windows Media Audio (WMA), Windows Media Video (WMV), AAC, AAC+ and H.264).
Microsoft released the PlayReady Client Porting Kit for mobile devices in early August 2007, and expects the first services that use the technology to appear in 2008.
According to the software giant, the emerging mobile content market topped $19 billion in 2006.
"It is in both (companies') interest that there is compatibility between the two and content can flow between devices," said Geoff Blaber, senior analyst at consultancy CCS Insight, cited by Reuters.
