Movielink has announced that it will use both RealSystem and Windows Media for it’s upcoming video-on-demand services.
“We wanted as low a hurdle as possible for consumers to be able to get movies through the most widely distributed players, Microsoft and RealNetworks, and the most secure digital rights management technologies,” Ramos said.
Note that they’re not supporting MPEG-4, probably because no mainstream MPEG-4 player supports DRM. I don’t interpret this as Movielink “turning their back on Apple” (as the author dramatically suggests), but it illustrates that Apple’s non-stance on DRM has a downside for its customers as well.
Movielink is backed by MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. Interestingly, this means that this deal effectively starves RealNetworks’ content services of movie content. Unless, of course, RealNetworks is giving them everything for free in order to get content for its own service. Hrmmm…
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