As we’ve previously discussed, the boundaries between types of content delivery have been slowly eroding for a while.  More than likely, hard media (CD, DVD, BluRay) will gradually become less prevalent while digital media (downloadable and/or streaming content) will become the norm.  It’s already very easy to buy or rent movies and TV shows digitally through services like Amazon (Etilities Forum) Video-on-Demand or Netflix (Etilities Forum).  The difficulty is that often you can only play your media on a few devices – sometimes just one!  For example, you may have bought the latest season of The Office from Amazon, but if you want to watch an episode on your Zune while working out, it may be a complicated endeavor due to the limitations of the notoriously pesky DRM implementations out there.

The industry is keenly aware of this fact and last week officially formed a group to discover a solution to this problem that would allow the content you’ve purchased to be viewable anywhere. Most of the big names among movie studios and media retailers are joining the effort, with the notable exception of Apple, Inc, which will no doubt continue developing their current solution to this problem: just buy all Apple products and you can watch your iTunes (Etilities Forum) purchases anywhere! (This solution has been working great for me, by the way.)

Regardless of whether or not this initiative succeeds (there are no details about it yet except for the fact that the group has been formed), this is definitely a step in the right direction and if anything shows that the industry is aware of this limitation and is actively trying to overcome it – and eventually will.

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