by Sören Stamer December 20, 2006 at 01:07 AM

Recently I had the opportunity to participate in an interesting discussion about open standards at the OMAWorld2006 in Washington. Jari Alvinen, Chairman of the Board of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), invited me to meet the Board members of OMA, without doubt global leaders of the mobile industry. It turned out to be a dinner to remember with very inspiring people. Thank you, Jari! I won’t ever forget this evening.

CoreMedia believes in open standards and is proud to be an active member of OMA for several years now. It is a perfect fit since interoperability through open standards is exactly what the OMA is all about.

But can open standards win in an ever changing future? And if so, where and how will they do?

Even though open standards are highly important, they are hard to deploy. And this might be an even more challenging task in the future. It takes quite some time to define, implement and deploy a global standard. And in a highly innovative environment you may not always have the time to do so. Instead people start implementing proprietary solutions before the standardization body is even ready to start. These are, by nature, competing and typically tend to delay the growth of whole marketplaces. Given the increased dynamics of today’s world standardization will be more difficult than ever. .

On the other hand, interoperability is key in an interconnected and converging world. This is a simple truth, but a very important one. Not surprisingly, open standards play a crucial part in the digital age. Just think of the Internet Protocol, better known as “IP”. IPv4 was defined in 1981 - staggering 25 years ago - and it is by far the most commonly used protocol on the Internet. Another good example is the Signaling System #7 also known as “SS7”. SS7 has been defined as a standard in 1981 as well and is still used to set up the vast majority of the world's telephone calls.

Well, there is a big difference between IP and SS7. While IP tends to be the poster child of the converging world, the future of SS7 looks a lot less shiny. All-IP networks will dominate the future with attractive new services like Voice-over-IP, and IPTV. SS7 may then be replaced by new lightweight protocols like SIP. I guess some standards are more sustainable than others when it comes to a fight.

Another strong competitor for open standards comes from the Internet space: Fueled by attractive services with some kind of network effects, proprietary “walled garden” solutions like iTunes or Blackberry push e-mail have also developed quite some momentum in the first place. Still, with these success stories in mind, I tend to believe that open standards will prevail. The potential benefits of open standards are simply superior to those of walled gardens.

Nevertheless, the weak spots of open standards have been increasing complexity, limited usability, poor time-to-market, and – recently – unresolved patent issues fueled by weaknesses of the existing patent law. Thus, we need to address these weaknesses as early and effective as possible in order to truly unfold the full potential of open standards.

by Willms Buhse November 08, 2006 at 10:34 AM

There is some buzz around our recent announcement about our partnership with Discretix to collaborate on the Interoperability of DRM. Louise Wells mentions the difficulties of standardized and interoperable DRM.

I would like to add to that though, that in my opinion two aspects are crucial if it comes to interoperability:

1. Ensure IOP among implementations of open standards like OMA DRM
2. Find ways to make different DRM schemes to work among each other - including the trust model

When it comes to the first, the OMA selected Coremedia DRM as the reference implementation some months ago. About 30 companies already rely on CoreMedia for DRM interoperability including the top handset providers, leading operators and many componment manufacturers

The second aspect is more complicated to achieve. From a technical point of view, OMA DRM allows the import and export of content to and from other DRM schemes.How to combine different trust models is much longer discussion I will not go into now... that said, several baby step activities are happening behind closed doors...

So, how many baby steps sum up to a big bang?

by Willms Buhse November 01, 2006 at 01:41 PM

Last week I was invited to give a keynote at the mobile content day in Munich. Here's a quick summary of my thoughts (slides here):

More and more content becomes available for mobile phone users. But how can all this be found? Are searches on Google or shopping lists on Amazon really engaging? Technology changes fast, social behaviour takes its time.
By looking back to social behaviour - how did people discover content a decade ago? In two engaging ways:

• either by spontaneous buy by discovering the offering in record stores (maybe triggered by radio or MTV before)
• or by recommendation: a friend tells you about his favourites - and you want them too.

So how can content technology support this social behaviour? I believe strongly in mobile TV and - yes - superdistribution will play a major role in discovery of mobile content. And in both cases DRM interoperability is mandatory to ensure that different content types can be consumed across a multitude of devices in a trusted environment.

by Sören Stamer September 16, 2006 at 07:07 PM

This might upset a lot of people: Microsoft's PlaysForSure is a worthless promise for those who do already own MS DRM protected music and want to buy a brand new Zune player from Microsoft. Zune says there is no choice.

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.