DCIA Summer Meeting
Special thanks to each of the participants in our Summer Meeting, held August 10, 2004 at the Sheraton Universal Hotel, Universal City, for helping make this a very productive session.
New company Media Rights Technologies (Gerd Leonhard, CEO) demonstrated its offerings to DCIA Members and guests. MRT’s business development leader Kelli Richards and technologist Eric Bittonio outlined MRT’s mission to “fill holes” in digital rights management (DRM) technologies by offering a player plug-in to enhance existing solutions. For audio it’s called X1; for video SecureDVD. MRT’s basic concept is to protect the pathway to content files. Please visit BlueBeat to see MRT in action.
We are especially grateful to representatives of the ten-company P2P Revenue Engine (P2PRE) project, including Sam Yagan, CEO of MetaMachine (eDonkey); Mike Farley, COO of Digital Containers; Sean Ward, co-founder and CTO of Relatable; and Tom Meredith, CEO of P2P Cash, for discussing the project with DCIA Members and staff, while their leader, INTENT MediaWorks (IMW) President Les Ottolenghi, oversaw logistics for P2PRE's bicoastal presentations to content rights holders involving more than forty participants.
Altnet, with 80 independent music labels, and Trymedia Systems, with 10 leading games publishers, demonstrate that content entered into P2P file-sharing environments by rights holders can be protected using DRM technologies and monetized using payment service solutions. One of the best immediate uses of P2PRE will be to help these entities expand current revenue streams and develop new ones, and we look forward to working with industry-leading entertainment attorney Doug Mark to make that happen.
The P2PRE project compliments Altnet and Trymedia’s successes by addressing content entered into P2P file-sharing environments by consumers. Its overriding goal is to demonstrate to major music labels and movie studios, through proof-of-concept testing and market-trials, to be conducted during a six-phase project rollout, that consumer-entered content can also be protected and monetized in P2P redistribution.
Participating companies include Shared Media Licensing, which will contract for test content; eDonkey, which will provide P2P software to distribute it; INTENT MediaWorks, which will package test content in three representative ways: 1) with advertising, 2) in subscriptions, and 3) for a la carte sales; Digital Containers, which will apply DRM to protect test content; Relatable, which will use acoustical fingerprinting to identify test content entered into P2P distribution by consumers; MediaGuide, which will match consumer-entered P2P files with their corresponding files in a rights-holder registry; AlmondNet, which will manage advertising support; Clickshare, which will handle payment processing; Peppercoin, which will track test content usage in subscriptions, and P2P Cash, which will issue payment tokens to unlock authorized files of test content for viewing or listening by consumers.
The first five phases can be summarized as a series of steps, each of approximately two-months duration or until reasonably satisfying all participants that its objectives have been met, focused on demonstrating protection and monetization of content: first, sample content entered into P2P by rights holders; second, that same sample content entered by consumers; third, the full library and catalog of participating rights holders; fourth, each transaction of all content entered by consumers; and fifth, expanding this from a closed test-P2P-program to an open commercial P2P-software-application. The sixth phase is commercial deployment, with other major rights holders and P2P software providers, and is projected to take six months.
The P2PRE project has been in development for the better part of a year, and some of the companies have been working on their parts for three years or more. It represents an extraordinary collaboration among these participating firms resulting in a very robust solution for P2P. We look forward to the commencement of testing, trials, and rollout of the P2 Revenue Engine.
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