Despite the difficulty of building consensus across the music industry, the Recording Industry Association of America's goal of creating a secure digital music delivery platform appears to be within reach.
Portable players with skeleton support for Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) are starting to pop up, and just in time for the Christmas rush.
On Thursday, Creative Labs announced that its next version of the Nomad player will support a digital rights management system, a core component of SDMI compliance.
SDMI is a technology standard that the RIAA is developing together with software and hardware companies that aims to provide an interoperable system for securing copyrighted music.
"We have basically what we need today to deliver a product based on the [SDMI] specification," said Chris Smith, the portable audio program manager at Creative Labs. "There are a number of digital rights management systems that will offer us the facilities to offer the protection that is required [to build into the Nomad II]."
The first phase of the SDMI system requires that manufacturers implement several security components, foremost among them a digital rights management (DRM) system that will allow record labels to securely distribute and track files as they are transmitted over the Net and on to portable players.
The Nomad II's DRM capabilities uses InterTrust's container technology and software created by MusicMatch. But, since the SDMI specifications are still in flux, none of the portable music manufacturers will be able to put together an SDMI-compliant system by Christmas.
"We will have an SDMI-capable [upgradeable] device out by Q4," said Smith. A fully SDMI-compliant device will most likely be available in Q1 of 2000. Creative will also post a download in Q1 to make the early players compatible.
In addition to its SDMI components, the Nomad II will use flash card memory, have a built-in FM tuner, voice recording, and connect to a PC via a Universal Serial Bus (USB); a wired remote also comes with the package. Smith said the Nomad II will support MP3 and Microsoft's Windows Media Format (WMF).
Smith said he expects to see about a half dozen portable players in Q1 that are SDMI-compliant. Each of the players may choose different music formats -- Microsoft's WMA, MP3, AAC, and Lucent's EPAC are the current choices -- and different DRM systems.
Thomson's Lyra was the first portable player to advertise SDMI-friendly features. The Lyra can encrypt MP3 and/or Real Network's G2 files and save them to CompactFlash memory cards. Like the new Nomad, the Lyra is re-programmable to adhere to the SDMI specifications when they are ready.
Microsoft threw its hat into the DRM ring on Wednesday, when it announced the Windows Media Device Manager (WMDM), software that links DRM to audio hardware and software players.
Whether consumers will bite on these security-conscious players is another matter -- and one that's squarely on the shoulders of the record industry.
"It's incumbent upon the labels to make that value [SDMI-equipped players] valuable said Smith. If they don't put anything up, people are just going to buy the unprotected MP3 players."
