Hutch launches 'DRM' to fight against music piracy

By R Jai Krishna

CHENNAI, June 27: Music Download is a growing form by which consumers buy
music. This is available on a variety of sources — online music stores being
the prominent one amongst others.

However, every year the Indian music industry suffers losses of around Rs. 5
billion due to piracy. Though the future of digital music distribution has
always looked bright, the key obstacle has been piracy through unauthorized
sharing of music once downloaded from the Internet. No clear cut method to
control illegal copy/download of music existed, especially with mobile phone
service providers.

Hutch, one of India's leading cellular service provider recently announced
the launch of a truly pioneering and an innovative service — 'Full Music
Download', which enables Hutch customers to download full songs on their
phones instead of just snippets, or tones.

This service comes with full “Digital Rights Management” or DRM. In
simple terms DRM could be termed as the technology that enables the secure
distribution, promotion and licensing of digital content. This is how DRM
prevents music piracy: When the DRM protected song is downloaded from
PlanetHutch, the song gets locked to the customer's mobile number and handset
and therefore can not be shared with others via blue tooth, Infra red, etc. The
song can be stored in the external memory card of the phone.

This makes Hutch the first service provider in the country to launch a full
song download service that is in the interest of both the consumers as well as
the music industry.

Talking to CyberMedia News, Naveen Chopra, Chief Marketing Officer of Hutch,
said that the innovation provides both convenience and value to Hutch customers.

“Convenience by enabling customers to get their favourite songs even when
they are on the move, without any additional music device or the need to go to a
music store or the need to connect to the internet through their PC. The
download costs as low as Rs 20 and eliminates the need to purchase an entire CD
for just (typically) one or two songs songs on the CD,” he said.

Naveen said that the full songs are in AAC+ format, which compresses the size
of the music file, enabling faster downloads and uses less space on the memory
chip — without compromising on the quality.

“The technology developed exclusively for Hutch by Siemens enables
compression of a song within 60-70 seconds during download and the song plays
within 10 seconds of it being downloaded, from the cache memory,” Naveen
informed adding that the software recognizes all the parameters of the mobile,
handset and the memory cache, and thus making it impossible for the song to be
forwarded.

Hutch customers could store as many as 200 songs on a typical 128K memory
card. To start downloading their favourite song, customers just have to click on
the 'music on demand' icon on PlanetHutch and download the music player
available - free of cost.