Cell Phone Guru

Cell phone giant Nokia will start to use Microsoft’s copy protection software to boost the use of wireless entertainment, like music and videos, the two companies said today.

Microsoft’s PlayReady technology allows users of Nokia cell phones to share protected pieces of content - like music, games or videos - between phones, PCs and other devices. Nokia will license the digital rights management (DRM) technology, and build it into its S60 software platform.

For consumers, PlayReady brings flexible ways to manage their digital content between online, home and mobile devices. For example, a consumer could purchase content directly from their Nokia device and then transfer the content to enjoy on other designated devices, such as PCs or mobile devices.

Microsoft PlayReady is designed for digital entertainment services, devices and applications. The technology supports a range of business models that can be applied to almost any type of digital content (music, video, games, ringtones, images and more) and a wide range of audio and video formats (including Windows Media Audio (WMA), Windows Media Video (WMV), AAC, AAC+, AMR and H.264).

Microsoft released the PlayReady Porting Kit for mobile devices in early August 2007, and expects the first services using Microsoft PlayReady technology to appear in 2008. In addition, Microsoft has designed PlayReady to be fully backward-compatible with Windows Media DRM 10, which means that devices supporting PlayReady can access existing Windows Media DRM-based content as well as new PlayReady content services.