DECE Progress Is Slow-Going, Despite New Additions

Written by Ryan Lawler

Friday, January 9. 2009 at 02:10 PM EST Post a comment

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The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem LLC (DECE) announced that it added six new consortium members this week, but appears to be behind schedule in producing a framework for digital content that can be purchased and viewed across multiple devices.

The consortium, which was first made public in September 2008, brings together participants from a wide range of industries in the hopes of creating a standards-based digital rights framework that would allow consumers to buy a piece of content once and use it across a number of devices, as well as being able to stream it online and burn it to physical media like DVDs.

Despite its lofty goals -- or perhaps because of them -- the group seems to be behind schedule in establishing some of the technical requirements and sorting through some of the business issues that come with trying to establish a standard that everyone involved can agree on.

In September, DECE president Mitch Singer told Contentinople that he expected the consortium would have some of the higher-level issues worked out by now, and that the group was targeting this week's Consumer Electronics Show as something of a "coming out party."

We will have more information available at CES, such as -- if all goes well -- a name and a brand and a product. We'll probably have more of the definitions finalized around what is the end product delivered to the consumer. We're hoping to have some specifications done by next year, so if you were to build a service or you wanted to build a device, you'd at least know what you were building.

Back then, Singer also stressed that all companies involved shared a "sense of urgency" and that everybody involved "shares the sentiment of, 'Wouldn't it be great if this happened sooner rather than later?'"

In a conversation with Contentinople at the 2009 International CES, Singer declined to give an ETA for the technical specifications or business decisions for the consortium.

"I wish there was a lot more to announce," Singer told us.

So what happened?

To some degree, the large number of stakeholders involved may actually be slowing it down. Participants in the group range from the major movie studios that create digital content, to the technology companies that make software and devices on which that content can be viewed, to digital rights management (DRM) companies that protect that content, to telecom equipment companies that make the gear over which that content is delivered.

Founding members include Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Best Buy Co. Inc. (NYSE: BBY), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK), Fox Entertainment Group, Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. (NYSE/Toronto: LGF), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), NBC Universal , Paramount Pictures Corp. , Royal Philips Electronics N.V. (NYSE: PHG; Amsterdam: PHI) , Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE), Toshiba Corp. (Tokyo: 6502), VeriSign Inc. (Nasdaq: VRSN), and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

And earlier this week, the group added six new participants, including Panasonic , Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (Korea: SEC), Deluxe Digital, MOD Systems, Sonic Solutions (Nasdaq: SNIC) (CinemaNow), and Widevine Technologies Inc.

But keeping all of those companies happy -- and finding a standard that they can all agree on -- can be a challenge.  Singer acknowledges that having so many companies from so many different industries makes it more difficult to build consensus.

Singer says that all the companies in the consortium are "actively participating and making great strides" toward establishing a specification that most participants can agree on. And he stresses that the group doesn't require all players to agree on a decision before going forward.

In the end, he says that having so many leading players involved will ultimately benefit the market and consumers. "When you get more companies engaged, you have more buy-in from all players," Singer says.

Carlos Monalvo, vice president of product marketing for Hewlett-Packard and a participant in the DECE, says that the consortium's work will serve as a counter-point to the current state of the consumer electronics industry, one in which CE manufacturers and content companies are stuck striking one-to-one deals with each other to enable consumers to view digital content on largely proprietary systems.  

"By creating an open standard, you're creating value for consumers and for manufacturers," Montalvo says.