DataPlay has a solution for music lovers who want to take entire albums with them: technology that can store up to 10 hours of MP3s on portable devices.
At Internet World on Wednesday, the Boulder, Colorado company unveiled a matchbook-sized optical drive that can store 500MB and will cost consumers less than $10. The storage technology could be used in portable music players, e-book readers, handheld computers, wireless phones, and digital cameras as early as next spring, when shipping begins.
The company hopes that music publishers will begin to produce albums as DataPlay discs since they can easily be mastered.
Music publishers requested that discs be mastered as read-only to protect the integrity of the music, according to DataPlay Chairman and CEO Steve Volk. He said the discs can include additional content such as an artist's earlier albums, music videos, or interviews. Consumers could unlock the content, which will be protected using DataPlay's ContentKey technology, by going online.
Volk said that although no publishers have licensed the technology yet, DataPlay has had discussions with all five of the major recording labels.
The Universal Music Group and Toshiba participated in DataPlay's announcement Wednesday.
But music download enthusiasts may be most intrigued by using DataPlay-enabled players for recording purposes since it offers nearly four times the 128MB of storage of current top-of-the-line portable devices.
Volk said adding DataPlay technology to an MP3 player would be "significantly less expensive than what (electronics manufacturers) pay for 64 MB of flash RAM today."
"The technology is interesting on a couple of fronts -- the form factor, the capacity of half a gigabyte" said Jeremy Schwartz, an analyst with Forrester Research. "The cost differential is huge," he added, noting that consumers can pay as much for a 64 MB memory upgrade as they do for the original player.
But making the devices write-once, where files cannot be deleted once they are stored, instead of rewriteable like the current RAM-based players, could be viewed negatively by consumers, Schwartz said.
"This could slightly limit the way it gets used as the primary memory mechanism," he said.
The Yankee Group's James Penhume said he thinks music publishers may have more enthusiasm for selling digital music in DataPlay's format than in offering downloads, which they have approached very cautiously.
"It strikes a middle ground for music distribution between (Internet downloads) and the existing model of selling CDs and cassette tapes," he said. Penhume said that although nothing stays locked forever -- people always find a way to break encryption -- Dataplay discs are "secure relative to downloads."
Analysts agreed that success for Dataplay hinges on its adoption by music publishers and major electronics firms such as Sony and Panasonic.
DataPlay has received endorsements from Capitol Records Nashville and Panasonic Disk Services Corporation.
"It's all about partnerships for them," Penhume said.
Schwartz concurred.
"It's cool technology, no question, but it all comes down to who's going to use it," he said.
