A Portable Chip for Digital Rights Management - When and Why?
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The Rolling Stones album mentioned above was originally scheduled to be available in the new format in November 2005. A search of the website a few days before this article went live, however, revealed no products yet available under the TrustedFlash name. Still, SanDisk showed the technology off at a press event at the CTIA Wireless Show in late September, and obviously believes it has potential. “We think this will be a disruptive technology, but will enable a whole new world of opportunities in the mobile market,” said SanDisk CEO Eli Harari about the product.
Indeed, the market might be ripe for it. According to IDC, more than 87 million phones with memory card slots were sold worldwide last year – and that number is expected to not quite double for 2005. Given the number of different mobile devices many tech-savvy people use, with the mobile phone being one among many (though quickly morphing to take on many roles), cards that allows you to use your favorite content on multiple mobile devices are going to be popular. That’s a point made crystal clear from the sales of ordinary flash memory cards. When that content raises potential copyright issues, and copyright holders want to restrict the number of copies made, doesn’t it make sense to still allow users to play it on whatever device they choose?
Still, it’s going to take a while for this technology to catch on, if it ever does. As Avi Greengart, a mobile device analyst at Current Analysis points out, “At $40, it’s going to be a really tough sell.” Indeed, SanDisk CEO Harari said that he expected the cards to cost more than his company’s current storage card products, which retail for about $50 for 512MB. He figures that it will be the end of 2007 before they bring in significant revenue for the company.
“This will take one or two years to become a very substantial business,” Harari predicted. He also pointed to one possible avenue of success, noting that “I’m not going to tell Steve Jobs what to do, because he’s a genius, but if Apple were to use their FairPlay digital rights management along with our TrustedFlash, they could rule the world.”
So when will we start to see the shape of things to come? SanDisk expects to roll out the complete line of TrustedFlash memory cards by March of next year -- barring any delays, of course. They will range in capacity from 256MB to 4GB.
Next: But is it Really What We Want? >>
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