An article on News.com today discusses how most pay-to-play (and many free) content services don’t support Macintosh. As is the case with many of News.com’s articles about digital media, the reporters are a little too lazy or uninformed to follow up on some of the most interesting bits.

For example, the story quotes Movielink CEO James Ramo as saying that Movielink doesn’t support Macintosh because they haven’t found a DRM that works on the platform. But (as noted in the article) RealNetworks offers RealOne SuperPass for Mac OS X, which means that RealNetworks’ Macintosh player does include the RealSystem DRM. So why is James blaming RealNetworks for their lack of Mac support? And does RealNetworks care that their most visible customer is blaming them for their lack of execution? Its inexcusible that the reporters didn’t make the connection and follow up.

Also, the reporters quote Apple VP Phil Schiller as saying that Apple hasn’t moved on DRM because of customer experience issues. But later in the article the writers claim that Apple “has shied away from DRM for technical reasons”. The reporters should’ve seen and followed up on the contradiction.

Finally, the reporters claim that MPEG-4 has “a DRM-shaped hole”. It’s not clear whether they made this up or whether this is something Apple told them, but they make it sound as if Phil told them this. The reality is that MPEG-4’s IPMP means that MPEG-4 vendors are responsible for filling in their own DRM-shaped holes. Everyone technology reporter knows that the chance to ask Apple about their hole only comes along once in a great while… | News.com article