Consumers “will buy more” with secure DRM that gives more purchasing options

Consumers will buy more content if they are given more purchasing options enabled by robust Digital Rights Management (DRM).  That was the view of the Chief Evangelist for Macrovision, Richard Bullwinkle, when Connected Home News spoke to him recently.

The zen master of DRM, whose resumé includes a prolonged stint developing the TiVo product range before joining Macrovision through its acquisition of Mediabolic in January 2007, firmly believes that DRM is, in his words, “an enabler rather than a disabler”.  “The challenge now with digital media is to make it easier to discover and purchase content.  We have to make digital media as transferable as analogue media.  If you look at iTunes, which has sold over a billion songs, Apple made it easier to acquire content legally than illegally.”

This is an interesting twist given the prevalence of pirated content – that legal content is more desirable and can be easier to access, despite the associated cost.  “I think that when you give consumers tons of choice on how they purchase the content, they will buy more – consumers want to feel good about their use of it.  We need to work on technologies that enable honest consumers to enjoy the content they want.”  This would certainly be music to the ears of content providers, as well as service providers - that consumers are willing to spend more money to buy or have access to legal content, rather than download inferior pirated material for free. 

Mr Bullwinkle believes that this can be furthered with a strong focus on standards.  “Standards will promote consumer confidence, I think.  Macrovision wants to develop an end-to-end solution that is standards-based, in order to achieve this.”  It is not an entirely rosy picture however for consumers that have abided by DRM and already spent a small fortune on building up a library of iTunes songs, as Mr. Bullwinkle points out: “Apple songs won’t however play on devices not made by Apple”, which comes back to the mantra of making digital media “as transferable as analogue media”.

As an indication of where things are heading in the future, Macrovision recently announced that Scientific Atlanta took out a site-wide licence of Macrovision’s digital home media solution.  Though the exact specifications of the upcoming cable boxes have not been announced, the licenses provides Scientific Atlanta with the ability to implement features that will  allow users to browse and store their personal and purchased content in Scientific Atlanta’s User Interface (UI).  The user may then be able to stream the content around the home, regardless of the device brand it is being streamed to, again enabled by a standards-based approach.  Whether this will be the only way to facilitate whole-home consumption of content is doubtful, but it certainly points the way to the ideal of making DRM seen as an “enabling” by-product of digital media.

Macrovision develops and markets video security technologies to enable pay-per-view systems.  Its clients include NetFlix, OpenTV, Cisco, Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens.

Visit:  www.macrovision.com