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Disney frozen out of studios' digital JV A consortium of leading studios, including Warner Bros, Sony, NBC Universal, Fox Entertainment, Paramount and Lionsgate, has teamed up with Microsoft to develop an industry-standard digital media framework – excluding Disney because of its association with Apple.  Initially, more than 20 companies will be involved in the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) – a digital rights management initiative to standardise the acquisition and playback of content across a range of services and devices. This could lead to the development of a rival to Apple's digital entertainment retail store iTunes.Disney's exclusion from the joint venture will be seen as a pre-emptive attack on iTunes – Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney's largest single shareholder, with about 7% of the company's stock. In addition to the above studios, other DECE launch partners will include Alcatel-Lucent, Best Buy, Cisco, Comcast, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Philips, Toshiba and VeriSign. The consortium will aim to "address growing consumer confusion around buying, downloading and playing digital content offered by multiple services by working towards a simple, uniform digital media experience." Mitch Singer, former exec VP of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Digital Policy Group, will serve as DECE president. "To open up the market for digital distribution, we are developing a specification that connects a wide variety of services and devices," said Singer. "DECE is taking the lessons learned from the successful 'buy once, play anywhere' experience that we enjoy with CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray today, and using a similar approach in developing the next-generation digital media experience." Over time, DECE will issue a licensable specification, along with a recognisable brand and logo for compliant products and services, which it says will "assure consumers that content they download will play on their devices." The specification, based on mutually agreed industry standards, will outline the hardware and software requirements for companies to follow. Adam Benzine 15 Sep 2008 © C21 Media 2008 
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