Hollywood launches Open Market play-anywhere plan

Hollywood studios including Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Time Warner are reportedly joining retailers including Amazon, Target and WalMart to launch Open Market, an initiative to install the policies, software and services necessary to enable interoperability between various digital media formats, devices and DRM schemes. According to TechCrunch, Open Market heralds a renewed effort by the major studios to jump start adoption of digital movie sales and eliminate the format fragmentation blamed as the culprit behind sluggish sales. The initiative, first proposed by Sony Pictures, would allow play-anywhere functionality by authorizing a neutral third party to manage device registrations and movie purchases/rentals, effectively ensuring interoperability across PCs, televisions, mobile handsets and other media-enabled devices. Conspicuously absent from the Open Market effort: Apple and The Walt Disney Company.

For more on Open Market:
- read this TechCrunch article

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