excerpt from
prostudio.com
(studio sound)
Cerberus and Liquid Audio were of course the two pioneers of secure online music download technology back in the mid-nineties. While Cerberus seems to have faded away, Liquid Audio has done a fine job of rolling with the flow of the rapidly changing online music landscape and maintaining its role as a significant player in the market. Meanwhile, the AT&T-backed a2b music, which championed the MPEG AAC encoding format, also appears to have faded from the stage, seemingly having never recovered from the blow of losing its two founders and around half its staff to digital rights management company Reciprocal last year. But undoubtedly the biggest development has been Microsoft's full-on entry into the streaming media market with Windows Media Technologies 4, a full-blown streaming audio and video, downloadable audio, and digital rights management technology package. As well as championing the take-up of broadband technology and the development of broadband content, Microsoft has been striking deals left, right and centre to establish its technology, and predictably has turned itself into a major player in the online audio marketplace--helped, inevitably, by the presence it was able to give its technology in the Windows OS. BMG, EMI and Sony have all announced support for Windows Media audio and-or video to deliver content online, and Sony has said that it will build Windows Media support into its portable audio devices and work with Microsoft on interoperabiltiy between Windows Media and its own OpenMG copyright protection technology.
Most recently, Microsoft has struck two major deals, one to establish Windows Media as the digital media platform of choice for T-Online, Germany's largest ISP with 4.15m subscribers, the other to incorporate Windows Media Audio support into Liquid Audio's music system. The Liquid Audio deal will see Liquid's catalogue of 50,000 downloadable songs and one million music previews encoded and distributed in Windows Media format; in addition, Liquid Audio will deploy Windows Media servers in its data centres, and integrate Windows Media's anti piracy features such as watermarking and encryption into its own IP rights management and reporting technologies.
As far as music compression formats are concerned, Liquid Audio is format-agnostic--one reason for its continued success. The company started out with Dolby Digital, then added MPEG AAC support, then MP3, and now not only Windows Media Audio but also Sony's ATRAC3 format. ATRAC3 provides around twice the data reduction of the ATRAC format used for MiniDisc; the newer version supports multiple bit rates, with 132kbps providing around 10:1 compression. In a deal struck with Sony, Liquid Audio will also add support for Sony's OpenMG copy protection technology and provide a custom-branded version of the Liquid Music Player that will be available to buyers of Sony's new VAIO Music Clip and Memory Stick Walkman devices. Liquid Audio also saw the importance last year of ensuring that its technology had a presence in the fast-growing portable player market, and developed and freely licensed the Secure Portable Player Platform (SP3) to help hardware manufacturers integrate Liquid Audio support into their players; currently the company is working with 12 manufacturers, including Sanyo, Toshiba, HP and S3/Diamond. Liquid Audio is also allied with e.digital, a company that has developed an SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative)-compliant multi-codec and multi-DRM (Digital Rights Management) Internet music player design built on a Texas Instruments DSP chip, with support for CompactFlash and the new Secure Digital memory cards as well as IBM's 340Mb Microdrive for storage. Codecs supported include Dolby Digital, MPEG AAC, MP3, Windows Media Audio, and Lucent's EPAC. e.digital's design could well become the basis of the next generation of portable audio players. |
