Hot Off The Press - Nokia Adds MS PlayReady Support
This is really hot, and literally JUST came into my inbox from the Nokia Press Release feed. Nokia and Microsoft are announcing that the PlayReady technology is now supported on both S40 and S60 Nokia devices. You can read the whole Press Release here.
This is fascinating. Nokia already supports Windows Media DRM 10, the MS DRM that’s used by Napster and Real’s Rhapsody music stores. Windows Media DRM 10, however, is only for music, as far as I know. The big benefit of PlayReady is that it supports all kinds of digital media. This includes music, video, pictures, games and ringtones. Wow, looks like I might have been right.
If you scan through the press release, you’ll see that PlayReady is also backwards compatible with Windows Media DRM 10. That means that devices with PlayReady can also use content protected by Windows Media DRM 10. Hmmmm, you know what else that means?
Nokia can release a music-only store on August 29th using Windows Media DRM 10. Most of their current devices can access and use this content. Then, later down the line, they can add videos, games, ringtones, and images to the lineup with the new PlayReady DRM. But you’d have to buy a new device to be able to use that part of the service. Nicely played.
I wonder if PlayReady support can be added via firmware update? I’ll tell you one thing for sure. The fun will start August 29th, and don’t expect a break until CES in January. And don’t you think I’d miss that for a million bucks!
DRM boooooooooooo!
Does this mean something like a N95 will be able to play wmv videos or even wma streams?
Stefan, I would say “boo” only if Nokia phones played DRM music only. Reality is that DRM is here to stay (at least for the foreseeable future), and Nokia devices must support it.
Nov 8th, 2008 at 5:00 am
[...] We’ve covered this before, that you can use nearly any online music store that uses Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM with your S60-powered phone. Newer phones with S60v3 Feature Pack 2 (and obviously, everything else going forward, such as S60 5th Edition) even natively playback .WMA and .WMV files with ease. [...]