California dreaming

The temptation on discovering that Microsoft has announced Windows Media 9 (WM9) is to download the beta and compare it to rivals Real Player, iTunes and Quicktime. WM9 would not compare badly on many points, but the interesting stuff isn't in the player.

To find the gold, look at the partners that joined with Microsoft as the WM9 Series was announced, and see how few are involved in the PC business.

On this occasion, it isn't users who are being wooed by Microsoft. It's the broadcast media, Hollywood, and the music studios that are being offered a tempting bait in the shape of copy protection.

Microsoft has, uniquely, been able to turn back the tide of copying with which the internet has been flooding the world.

According to market researcher Context, Microsoft has been so successful in getting XP licensing accepted that the corporate money spent on Windows has "significantly reduced the budget available for new PCs, impacting the market for hardware".

And that's before most corporate customers adopt XP for anything other than testing purposes.

This success has not been matched by the record business, despite the closure of Napster. With MP3 swap sites booming and MP3 files filling newsgroups, music changes hands freely.

Sales of CDs are down and, while nobody knows whether this is due to recession or copying, the industry is blaming piracy and theft. The movie business is terrified that this chaos will spread to DVDs, with technology like Edonkey which scans newsgroups for people posting video in defiance of copyright.

So when Bill Gates launched WM9 in Hollywood at the beginning of September, the main thing he was offering was a hope of copy protection for music and pictures.

He looks to a future in which you simply can't make an illegal copy of something which is intellectual property. His new encoder even offers to make users produce compressed CDs that can't be shared with friends without deliberately disabling the copy-protection built into WM9.

Instead of getting the music, you get a licence to listen to it; and that licence can run out. When that happens, the file becomes inaccessible, encrypted junk.

It's a future in which MP3s themselves might have copy protection but, more importantly, it's one in which Windows Media formats are the only digital game in town.

The dream is that every piece of 'intellectual property' is encrypted and can't be played without a licence.

It is a dream of a world where all media players are connected and, if you put a disc into a player or load a file, the player tells Copyright Central: 'It's this file; are we licensed to play it?' And if it doesn't get a 'yes' from HQ, it refuses to play.

What matters is not the PC. Will Poole, head of Windows media, sees WM9 going into the broadcast studios, into satellite distribution systems, cable providers and set-top boxes. It will also go into your CD player, your DVD player and your games machine, if it has a media player.

Already, you can buy a CD player that plays MP3 and Windows Audio compressed files as well as Red Book music CDs. And the Windows Audio is tempting.

"Get CD-Quality Audio at Half the Size of MP3!" screams the Microsoft website. "Windows Media audio files deliver CD-quality sound at only half the size of comparable MP3 files.

"This means content providers save on bandwidth and storage costs, and consumers get faster downloads and can store twice as much music."

The point is that WM audio files can be safely given away as free samples. They can be given temporary licences, which expire. To launch a new band, you could put their entire first album on the web in WM9 format, with a licence that restricts usage to one day, one week or even one month.

You have 'rollback detection' which wipes the file if someone resets the system clock. You can even include this in handheld devices such as multimedia messaging services (MMS) phones or multimedia Pocket PC devices. If you play an album, it will dial home and check if you have a valid licence.

If you don't, it will either refuse to play or spend a dollar on a new licence, taking the money out of your Passport-enabled bill.

Microsoft's partners are ecstatic. Tandberg TV will be offering its big broadcast customers a choice between mpeg and Windows Media all down the line, from the head-end kit through to the players and even set-top boxes.

Its engineers think that WM9 is a significant advance. "You can do things with this, like broadcast quality TV over ADSL, which you couldn't do very easily with mpeg-2," said Tandberg TV strategic development director Tim Sheppard.

The company believes that the Microsoft standard is close to final release, unlike rival mpeg-4 standards, and that it will be pervasive.

"[Microsoft is] doing a massive push into the consumer space; not just the PC, but set-top boxes, DVD boxes and game players, all of which will appear with WM9 capability," said Sheppard.

"This means the broadcaster doesn't have to fund so much; it becomes possible to go for the standard Windows package and assume that playback will be there. Broadcasters won't have to fund the set-top box the way ITV Digital had to."

The new player and new encoder look pretty good, even in beta form. Apple's latest iPod players and iTunes software have all sorts of new, funky features, such as rating your music and sorting it by rating, playing 'only tunes I haven't listened to recently', joining tracks together to avoid long breaks, or setting the volume level for all music to be the same. WM9 has all that, but it also does video.

Gone are the long buffering waits. Movies start playing right away, even on 56K links. A feature called 'video smoothing' lets you download at 10 frames a second (fps), and play back at 20. The software invents the intermediate frames and it works incredibly well on some material.

But hidden behind all this is copy protection. You can't, for instance, use MP9 to make MP3 files; you have to download an MP3 codec from a third-party provider and plug it in. The official reason is that WM9 is free with Windows (for now) and Microsoft would have to pay for the codec.

But if Apple can include an MP3 ripper with iTunes, Microsoft could do so with WM9 if it wished. It does not want to offend its studio partners by helping people create unprotected media files.

Of course you will still be able to record audio directly, just as you can transfer a CD to cassette. But Microsoft, I suspect, doesn't care if it is tempting the studios with a false dream of total control.

It wants to make Windows Media the standard for audio and video and, if it gets the studio system on its side, it hardly has to worry about doing any marketing. It just has to sit back and watch the tills count up.

The WM9 beta, recommended especially for XP, is available here.

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