Comcast Joins Coral Consortium

TheRegister: This week the Coral Consortium has signed up it's newest member Comcast, adding to the thirty-something companies already signed up (not including Microsoft, Macrovision or Apple.) Currently, all the major record labels, all the studios (except Disney and Viacom) and the two largest U.S. cable TV operators are signed up to support Coral’s architecture that promises to make different DRM’s interoperate. The move for Comcast makes sense since companies that used to run "walled gardens" are now looking for new business models beyond conditional access systems and a robust DRM system is needed to allow secure optical multimedia copies and controlled movement onto portable devices. Savvy video content providers should be looking at all the angles for future secure distribution, because licensing their content for use on Windows Media DRM only reaches millions of PC users - not the billions that have TVs...

The article goes on to state that by Christmas 2005 the technology should be here and by Christmas 2006 it should be an established technology...However, Coral had better hurry up and finalize its specifications because failure to do so would mean that the world will be stuck with PC-based DRM and that will mean another monopoly for Microsoft.