• Sidebar: What Is MTP?

Windows Media Player 10 improves support for buying rights-protected music and video and transferring it to portable players, with features such as automatic synchronization and transcoding of content, driverless connections, and better integration with online stores. The changes bring Microsoft and its partners closer to the ease of use offered by Apple's digital media products while presenting a greater choice of content sources and compatible devices. However, it's not clear whether the changes are significant enough to wrest market share from Apple, nor whether Microsoft can offer broader choices than RealNetworks, which supports more digital media formats.

The Roles of the Windows Media Player

Microsoft's digital media strategy is to position the Windows PC as the hub of home entertainment by making it the best device for downloading, storing, and editing digital media content, and by spurring partners to create devices that can connect to a PC to play this content. Microsoft will benefit when consumers buy new PCs or upgrade their OS to take advantage of new digital media capabilities, and when device manufacturers and content owners and distributors license its Windows Media Format and associated technologies.

The Windows Media Player, which ships as a component of Windows but is updated on a separate schedule, plays two important—but sometimes conflicting—roles in this strategy:

• It provides an interface for tasks such as organizing digital media files, playing them, and transferring them to removable media or devices; without the Player, users would have to install one or more applications to perform these tasks
• It promotes Microsoft's preferred formats, technologies, and partners.

Microsoft has often favored the latter role at the expense of the former. For instance, because Microsoft wanted to promote use of its Windows Media Audio format, past versions of the Player (before the new Windows Media Player 10) required a third-party plug-in for users to encode content from audio CDs (known as ripping) into the MP3 format at a high-quality level. This is a commonly desired task, since MP3 is still the most broadly supported format on personal computers, portable players, and consumer electronics devices.

This tendency to use the Player to promote specific technologies has contributed to the complexity of working with digital media on a PC, leaving an opening for competitors such as Apple to exploit.

Simplicity vs. Choice

Apple has a clear lead in two digital media markets: portable players and online stores. Consumer market researcher NPD reports that Apple's iPod accounted for about 40% of all portable digital audio devices sold in the United States in May 2004, far ahead of the nearest competitor, Rio, with 15%. (Globally, the iPod, which uses a hard drive, has a share around 10% because flash-based players are much more popular in some markets, particularly China.) In addition, 70% of all legal music downloads on the Internet come from Apple's iTunes Music Store, according to Forrester Research.

Although Apple's success has helped spur the market and convince content owners that computer-based digital media is an opportunity rather than a threat, Microsoft benefits little from this success. Users do not need the latest Windows OS to use Apple products (or a Windows PC at all, for that matter), and these products do not support the Windows Media Format and therefore provide no royalties to Microsoft. Left unchecked, Apple's dominance could eventually cause OEMs, content owners, and device makers to veer away from Microsoft's platform and toward Apple's. For instance, Hewlett-Packard announced in Jan. 2004 that it would begin bundling iTunes on new PCs and manufacturing an iPod clone.

One reason for Apple's lead is that its products and services, which were originally designed to fit into its iLife family of integrated digital media tools for Macs, offer a smooth user experience on a PC or Mac. Apple's iTunes software lets users rip files from an audio CD in either full-bit-rate MP3 or Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format (based on MPEG-4), download songs or albums to a computer from the integrated iTunes Music Store, synchronize this content with an iPod, stream playlists over a network to other computers, and even stream audio to other home entertainment devices using Apple's Airport wireless networking technology. By and large, these products work together with little user intervention required.

In contrast, equivalent scenarios with products from Microsoft and its partners require users to install third-party software, such as drivers for portable devices and applications for functions such as ripping MP3 files and buying music from particular stores. In the process, users are forced to learn and navigate multiple interfaces and resolve conflicts, such as competing applications fighting for control of file types and prompting the user every time a particular file is selected.

Microsoft has rightly pointed out that its approach offers users a broader choice of device types, online stores, and types of media (iTunes and iPod do not support video), and provides a much broader range of opportunities for partners than Apple's approach. But so far, consumers seem to value simplicity over choice when it comes to digital media.

Main Goal: Improve Ease of Use

Released in Sept. 2004, Windows Media Player 10 and its accompanying technologies are meant to match Apple's ease of use in several key scenarios, particularly those involving portable and networked devices and purchases from online stores, while continuing to add new functionality that Apple lacks, such as support for portable digital video players.

Unlike the case with past refreshes of the Player, other parts of the Windows Media platform are not changing: the Windows Media codecs (underlying technology for compressing content), Encoder (an application for creating Windows Media files), and Services (software that comes with Windows Server and allows companies to host and stream Windows Media files) are not being updated.

Better Device Support

New technologies and an improved interface in Windows Media Player 10 offer better support for portable and networked devices.

Media Transfer Protocol (MTP). Windows Media Player 10 will support this new protocol for connecting hard-drive-based portable digital media devices to a PC and synchronizing content between them. Among other benefits, MTP eliminates the need for manufacturers to create and users to install drivers for these devices and supports automatic two-way synchronization of files and associated file properties. (Flash-based devices will continue to use the Mass Storage Class, or MSC, protocol, whose drivers are already included with recent versions of Windows.) Users will generally have to buy new devices that support MTP to take advantage of it, although some existing devices will be upgradeable via a firmware update.

(For more information on MTP and the features it enables, see the sidebar "What Is MTP?".)

Windows Media 10 digital rights management (DRM). The latest version of Microsoft's DRM technology allows users to transfer subscription or rental content to portable devices, opening many new scenarios. For example, in Sept. 2004 Napster began offering a trial service called Napster To Go under which users can pay US$14.95 per month to transfer an unlimited number of the service's 700,000-plus songs to a portable device and continue to play those songs or swap them out for new ones for as long as the subscription is retained. (For background about the interaction between rental media and portable devices, see "DRM to Support Subscription, Rental Services" on page 26 of the June 2004 Update.)

As with MTP, users will need new devices or firmware updates to play files encoded with the new DRM technology. Microsoft is planning a logo program, tentatively called "Plays For Sure," to help users find devices and stores that offer files with compatible formats and DRM schemes, but the company is not discussing details until later in 2004.

Windows Media Connect. Introduced at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show, this protocol will enable a PC to automatically recognize compatible devices as they're added to the network. The devices will then be able to catalog certain types of digital media files stored on that PC (including Windows Media Format, MPEG, and AVI) and play those files from the PC over the network.

Although Windows Media Player 10 is the delivery mechanism for adding Windows Media Connect support to PCs, Microsoft is not planning to discuss the technology in detail or announce supported devices until later in 2004.

Interface changes. Player interface changes will help users work with portable and networked devices. For instance, any compatible media device connected to the PC will show up in the Windows Media Player's Library, along with a list of all content on that device. In addition, recorded TV programs and digital photos will automatically have their own areas of the Library—this is necessary to support Portable Media Centers, a new class of digital media device based on a Microsoft reference platform that enables users to play video and display pictures as well as play audio.

Integrated Music Stores

A new Digital Media Mall in Windows Media Player 10 offers better integration with online stores and partners such as CinemaNow, Napster, and Wal-Mart, as well as the new store from MSN. This integration should reduce the need for users to download a special plug-in or application and learn a new interface for each store.

For instance, menu options on the Player will change depending on the store selected (e.g., "Music" and "Radio" for Napster; "Movies" for CinemaNow) and all acquired media will automatically be added to new "Purchased Music" or "Purchased Video" nodes in the Player's Library. In addition, the logo of the last store selected will remain in the upper-right corner of the Player even when the user is performing other tasks, offering a prominent branding opportunity for partners. (OEMs and distributors will be able to set the store that initially appears.)

Other Improvements

Windows Media Player 10 includes improvements that make other common tasks easier:

Ripping music from CD. For the first time, the Windows Media Player will let users rip MP3s at up to 320Kbps without a plug-in. In addition, users no longer get a dialog box asking if they want to copy-protect music they rip into the Windows Media Format. Some users checked this box without understanding its implications (prior to Windows Media Player 9, it was checked by default), then became confused when they couldn't figure out how to transfer ripped music files among their own PCs, even though they had purchased the original CD and had the legal right to do so.

Playing music. The Player has numerous interface improvements meant to improve its playback capabilities. For example, the Search pane is always visible in the Player interface, so users can simply type in the name of an artist or album and press "Play," and the appropriate songs will begin playing; previously, users had to navigate to the Library and select songs from a tree menu. In addition, the Now Playing list is dynamic, allowing users to drag and drop new songs onto it during playback.

Is It Enough?

Windows Media Player 10 and its accompanying technologies take a major step toward matching Apple's ease of use, but they may not go far enough. Ironically, in spite of Microsoft’s goal to make the PC a digital media hub, Apple still has the edge in this area. For instance, iTunes users can create music playlists on one computer, then allow other computers to access those playlists over a home network—essentially, networked computers can act like jukeboxes connected to a digital media server. Although the Windows Media Player can play songs from other computers over a network, those songs must be added into the Windows Media Player's Library and incorporated into a new playlist, a more labor-intensive process.

More generally, because Microsoft relies on partners to move its digital media strategy forward, certain aspects of this strategy remain out of its control. For instance, before Portable Media Centers emerged, Microsoft had little influence over the design of portable music players (one of the iPod's big advantages), and it still can't prevent online stores from forcing users to download separate software. Apple, in contrast, makes its own hardware and software and tries to limit users of these products to its own music store. This allows it to exercise much greater control over the entire process of buying, playing, and transferring digital media to devices.

Finally, Microsoft must continue to fend off challenges from RealNetworks, whose format-agnostic approach allows it to offer a greater range of choice to consumers in some areas. For example, RealPlayer software plays file formats that the Windows Media Player does not, and songs downloaded from the latest version of the RealPlayer Music Store are playable on any Windows Media device or iPod.

Availability and Resources

Windows Media Player 10, like its predecessor version in 2002, will be available initially for Windows XP only. The company may eventually release versions of the Player for downlevel platforms, but these versions will probably lack some features of the XP version.

More information on Windows Media Player 10 is available at www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia.