Seattle, Washington-based Melodeo, which started life as a mobile Peer 2 Peer software company and now offers the Mobilecast podcast software for mobile phones, has opened up the DRM software at the heart of its offering.
PachyDRM (pronounced pachyderm) has been made available to provide open source DRM software that can be used on any device on any network, as opposed to other restrictive DRM offerings.
The industry needs a working, open alternative to onerous, closed, and proprietary technologies such as Apple Fairplay and Microsoft DRM, said Jim Billmaier, Melodeo CEO.
The PachyDRM specification is available now under specification, source code, and distribution licenses. The specifications are free for use in clean-room environments, with the source free for R&D purposes, while there is an annual support fee for commercial distributions of $5,000 per server and five cents per device unit.
Melodeo is not the only company working on open source DRM code. In August 2005 Sun Microsystems Inc launched its Open Media Commons and Project DReaM software – a DRM architecture, a streaming server, and APIs.
Industry watchers were surprised by the lack of third-party support accompanying Sun’s announcement, and PachyDRM was similarly lacking in support from third-party content providers or device manufacturers, although the company did note that the code had already been used for mobile media sharing.
One thing it did promise, however, was support for the long-term goals of Sun’s DReaM and the potential for PachyDRM to act as a bridge to the availability of the DReaM solution so the two projects could become their own biggest supporters.
Venture-backed Melodeo has been going for two years and has raised $11.5m in two round of funding, first from Ignition Partners and Voyager Capital, and then with the addition of Intel Capital and GF Capital.
