#comments

Every now and again all the second through nth string players in a market dominated by one company decide to band together and have a run at that main player. Remember the FairMarket Network? It was that thing that brought some big players (like Microsoft and Dell) together to take down Ebay. Or PlaysForSure? That thing where everyone tried to take down Apple? No? Yeah.

So the latest I’ve read is there’s a new alliance in town creating the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem! Wow! That just rolls off the tongue! The central point of this group is to come up with some specs so that digital media bought one place will run everywhere (well, everywhere that uses DECE). Naturally, Apple is not involved with this group, even a little bit. Instead it’s got Sony, Microsoft, Intel, etc…

Consumer focus: HAHAHA ha ha ha.

There’s just so much stupid going on here. I mean, that they chose that name is your first clue that this is going to be an over engineered, fragile, terrible load that no one actually wants. Let’s just start out with their notion that they are touting that for the first time ever they will put the consumer “at the center of the universe.”

Wow. Really? Because I know a great way to put the consumer at the center of the universe that will really genuinely make a difference. Stop using DRM. Yeah, then you know what? All their digital media will already play on all the devices they have. It’s true. And amazing. See Sony? I already did all your work for you. I’ll wait for my check.

I’m pretty sure all the companies in this alliance don’t even know what their consumers actually want. If any of them did, they’d provide digital media playing devices that people actually bought. So throw them all together and they’ll have even less of an idea. Sony sure as hell doesn’t, they went from having the dominant portable media playing devices (Walkman, remember that?) to being less than a bit player in that space. In like a day. That’s what they get for loving their content more than their consumers.

Grandiose Plans

Secondly, their goals are positively Microsoftian in proportion. They want hardware, software and even a service included in this. I bet you in their meeting (of a bunch of 60 year old guys who saw the internet that time) someone sagely said, “We need to add the web2 point oh’s to this thing.” and they all nodded seriously. He probably got a promotion.

So there’s some kind of virtual library that somehow all your digital media gets to after you buy it, then all your DECE compliant devices can access them wherever they are on the net. You just know, you just KNOW that this is never going to get made. They’ve gone crazy and taken the kitchen sink approach to designing this. It’s going to take more years than I care to think about for them to have something and by the time it’s ready, well, it will be irrelevant for whatever reason.

Also their goal of having this thing play everywhere. Well, at least for music (which is most of digital media right now) it’s not going to play on the device that everyone actually uses to listen to music. With no iPod support, who cares? I’m not saying it’s good for Apple to be all proprietary with their DRM, but that’s just a fact of life.

If these companies want to compete for real on that playing field what they should be doing first and foremost is convincing the industry that DRM doesn’t benefit anyone, not the content companies nor the consumer. Then if they can lower DRM adoption they need to create devices that don’t suck. Honestly this approach has a much greater chance of success than coming up over the next decade (at least, no?) of some kinda hardware/software/service spec.

What’s worked

Let’s look at what little has been successful. StubHub was starting to be successful at taking some bits of Ebay’s business. It did this by the unorthodox method of providing a focussed service that simply was better than what Ebay provided for their niche. Sure it’s better is not a guaranteed winner, but you know, it helps. And then Ebay bought them, but still.

Or Amazon’s MP3 store. While it still is not a true threat to the iTunes Music Store, it is actually holding it’s own and growing. I’ve already switched to using it, it is cheaper, DRM free and it provides a better shopping experience.

These are true consumer focused services that found some success in combatting the giants of their industry. Not any stupid alliance. You think DECE is on to something? Have I gone mad?