KEY POINTS:
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, every man and his dog was touting the "connected home" - shifting content from mobile phone or music player to a living room media hub to the computer in the study, wirelessly and with ease. And it's not just hype. New devices unveiled at the show make sharing digital content easier than ever.
But one big thing threatens to derail all the progress that has been made: digital rights management (DRM), or more precisely the different rights management systems that the technology industry, and Microsoft and Apple in particular, choose to support.
What if I want to buy the new Apple TV digital media hub, and play the premium content I've bought and stored on it on a Creative Zen player or the Microsoft Zune? I'll be out of luck. Differing digital rights management systems mean that, for some time to come, what devices we buy will depend on what copyright protection system we're already lumbered with.
While it's fair enough for companies to take different approaches to technology development, even if those approaches are largely driven by Hollywood studios, backing differing copyright protection systems does no one any good.
As I passed by the massive flat-screen TVs and rows of shiny mobile phones in Las Vegas, I was dreaming of a world where I would not have to worry about being locked in by copyright protection. A world where I could shuffle content between my various devices without needing to have an all-or-nothing relationship with any one technology vendor.
Funnily enough, that's also the dream of Jim Allchin, the Microsoft vice-president who will retire once his baby, Windows Vista, is released to consumers this month.
"My dream is that there are no bits to be applied at all," he told me last week in Seattle when I asked him about Microsoft's approach to adding digital rights management to content.
He reckons DRM is too complicated for consumers but says chances of a universal system are slim.
"It's not like we haven't asked [Apple chief executive] Steve Jobs. He's got a lock and he likes his lock. He's turned us down over and over," said Allchin, who added that the entertainment giants were "extreme in their perspectives" when it came to digital rights management and that Microsoft was trying to "walk this fine line" in protecting the rights of Windows users and content providers.
Despite the fact that Microsoft in 1997 invested US$150 million in Apple and that Allchin himself wrote in a revealing 2004 email that "I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft", the rivalry between the two companies is intense and seems to prevent any co-operation on DRM.
When asked about Apple's new iPhone, Allchin was not encouraging: "Frankly I like my phone. I do just fine and it didn't cost me anything near what he cost me, without that DRM stuff from him." By "he", Allchin, of course, means Steve Jobs.
But while Microsoft grumbles about Apple's unwillingness to come together on a universal rights management system that would make our digital lives easier, it's happy to mimic Apple's closed system with its own music player, the Zune.
Despite implementing its PlaysForSure system, which music-player makers and online music store operators use so their devices and services work with Windows and Media Player, the Zune works only with the Zune Marketplace when it comes to music downloads - just like the iPod-iTunes model.
And while Windows Vista has been well received for its across-the-board improvements, it may be the digital rights management aspects of Vista that stop many people from upgrading.
New Zealand's Peter Gutmann set off a storm of debate on the internet a few weeks ago with a paper claiming Microsoft's content protection features of Windows Vista made it "the longest suicide note in history".
Gutmann claims Vista's DRM will degrade performance when it comes to playback of next-generation HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs.
"If I do ever want to play back premium content", he wrote, "I'll wait a few years and then buy a $50 Chinese-made set-top player to do it, not a $1000 Windows PC. It's somewhat bizarre that I have to go to communist China to find vendors who actually understand the consumers' needs."
Allchin hadn't heard of Gutman or his paper - or so he said. But as he sails off into retirement he's surely aware of one thing - the wider issues around digital rights management threaten to limit the effectiveness of the operating system he and his colleagues have spent the last few years creating.
