by Willms Buhse September 15, 2006 at 10:31 AM

I am just coming back from the Mecca and CTIA show in Los Angeles. While thinking about the big news - well there was actually none (it except for Arnold and Paris showing up).
During a panel on strategies and trends for mobile music, interoperability became a big topic. I almost fell of my chair, when a major manager said: "interoperability is the technology companies responsibility - we can't do anything!?".
Well, it's music products we're talking about, right? I really wish the copyright holders would step up and take stronger responsibility for making sure consumers can enjoy their music wherever they like.
Especially when it comes to mobile content, the issues consumers are facing when changing their phone, or worse changing their provider, haven't been thought through carefully in the US-market. This might lie in the fact that content owners and operators alike look at DRM on an application level (specifically designed for a music application, a video service, etc.). In Europe the leading operators have realized that it is more an infrastructure component that can be used across different applications. This makes it much easier to integrate the same DRM across all applications rather than having isolated solutions. We have seen many migration projects which caused major customer care issues after consumers were locked into proprietry DRM solutions.