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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; these include the concept of domain (group of devices belonging to the same user which can share the same licenses), Embedded Licenses (licenses that are embedded in the content files, avoiding a separate step for license acquisition) and envelopes (the ability to protect arbitrary, potentially non-media content)
  • 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 has entered 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 Intellectual Property Rights ('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. Companies like Nokia, Netflix have adopted Playready.

Microsoft released the first version of the PlayReady suite (Porting Kit for devices, PC SDK and runtime, Server SDK) in June 2008. Silverlight 2.0, released in October 2008 is powered by a version of PlayReady. The PlayReady in Silverlight supports only connected playback with streaming or progressive-downloaded content, and has no capability to store licenses for offline or disconnected use. It is also currently lacking output protection controls, and other features of the full PlayReady product.

Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008 and Windows 7 use the PlayReady PC runtime to protect premium TV content

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.

Interoperability

PlayReady is a pure proprietary solution and therefore will not be compatible with any non-Microsoft restriction systems. 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.

References

  1. ^ Microsoft Announces Breakthrough Technology Enabling Simple Access to Broad Set of Digital Content, Including Music, Games, Video, Ring Tones and Pictures: Microsoft PlayReady powers next-generation media experiences on mobile networks; mobile operat...
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