In the area of digital entertainment, Samsung Electronics last week announced that it had undertaken options to adopt Microsoft PlayReady for its consumer devices. PlayReady is designed as a method to access content and provide protection to different technologies. Playready is a variant of a the digital rights management system that spans a variety of devices and applications, and even digital entertainment services. It was originally released in February 2007. PlayReady is Microsoft’s digital-rights-management solution, which is bundled with Windows 7.  By moving to Playready, Samsung indicated that it would stop using Windows Media Digital Rights Management, as soon as its products were migrated to PlayReady.

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PlayReady features that were already present in other schemes that restricted consumer operations in the market have been added. One of these is the domain, where a group of devices that belong to the same user can share the same license, Another feature also involves licenses. These are embedded licenses that come built in the content files. They avoid the separate step of license acquisition. And finally envelopes are included which provide the ability to restrict arbitrary, and potentially non-media content.

PlayReady will be platform independent. This is not like other Microsoft consumer restriction schemes, for example, Janus, PlayReady can be migrated to any kind of portable device even those that use non-Microsoft technology such as OS’s, codecs, or media player. It is this feature, the use anytime anywhere, that Samsung found most appealing. Its products will be able to play on a range of products. Mobile phones, digital video players, televisions, and other entertainment devices will be able to play the same content, especially if the media is copyright protected.

By pairing software such as PlayReady with Samsung’s broad line of consumer electronics products Samsung is poised to offer consumers new ways to deliver, share and enjoy digital content. Samsung will be shipping the first products that have PlayReady support by the end of the year.

Source: Microsoft