Sunday, January 08, 2006

So the big news coming out of the 2006 Consumer Electronic Show (CES) is that all the portals are now trying to go into the video space. Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo have already made their announcements (as has Apple, which is not presenting at CES and is reserving its sparks for next week's Mac World) and word has been leaking that Google will also get into the space. So it's time to review, side by side what each player has to offer.

It looks like we will be dealing with three different types of digital right management systems, making it difficult to actually have content play on every single device. If only Apple, Microsoft, and possibly Google, could sit down and agree on a standard way to handle this, it would make everyone's life easier. However, because they all want to lock-in users, we will see an increasing amount of incompatibilities pop up.