For those who follow developments in digital media technology, there are two useful ways to look at DECE, while bearing in mind that technical and policy details are still being worked out. 

From a technical perspective, DECE can be thought of as "Coral Lite."  Coral was a DRM interoperability specification, created by a group of companies led by Intertrust, Sony, Philips, and a few other consumer electronics companies, which enabled services that would translate consumers' legitimately-obtained media from one DRM to another.  Coral has not gotten traction in the market.  But many of the ideas in Coral other than DRM interoperability have migrated to the DECE concept.

At heart, the DECE concept is a variation on the idea of rights lockers.  A user goes to her service provider and purchases a content item, such as a movie or TV show. The service provider makes a record of what she purchased in her rights locker.  Subsequently, she has the ability to go back to the service provider and obtain the same content in another format.  At a conceptual level, the Hollywood studios generally agree with the idea that consumers should be able to pay for a piece of content once and use it on any device in their home or personal network.  The DECE vision also encompasses the idea that consumers can get their content from their choice of service providers, which will then need to compete on price as well as features and levels of service.

But there are some restrictions.  Devices must support DRMs that are on the consortium's approved list, and they must be capable of registering their identities with the service provider over a network.  The people behind DECE decided that if the service provider can make files available in any common and acceptable format, there is little need to translate from one DRM to another.

The other way to think about DECE is -- as with any standards initiative or consortium -- to look at which companies are participating and which are not.  From this perspective, DECE can be thought of as "Everyone But Apple."  The initial announced DECE membership contains several major consumer electronics companies, notably Sony and Microsoft.  It also includes IT and telecom equipment powerhouses like HP, Intel, Cisco, and Alcatel-Lucent.  VeriSign, one of the prime movers behind the original Open Market concept, is on hand to provide network-based identity management infrastructure that is key to making device authentications work.  And every major Hollywood studio is on board... except Disney, which (given that Steve Jobs is on its board) is further evidence that Apple's non-involvement is not coincidental.

The market for home and mobile digital video is still in an early, unstable stage; Apple does not have anywhere near the dominance in it that it does in digital music.  Yet the formation of this consortium, with this set of players, is clear evidence that everyone is deeply concerned that Apple will repeat its success in video.

From a technical perspective, the rights locker model is easier to pull off than the full Coral DRM interoperability model.  But it requires the cooperation of service providers.  Service providers stayed away from Coral in droves, for several reasons: first, all Coral offered was a spec.  Service providers had to contemplate implementing large-scale, complex software virtually from scratch, which was an expensive and intimidating prospect.  There were no "Coral-in-a-box" startups to license or acquire. 

Second, the Coral licensing agreement required service providers to make their rights lockers portable for users, in the same sense that SIM cards enable GSM phone users to switch carriers easily.  Service providers found that the money they stood to make on premium content sales was not enough by itself to make the exercise worthwhile; they needed to be able to lock customers in to their rights lockers (metaphor-pun intended) to increase lifetime value of the customer. 

The level of infrastructure complexity in the rights locker model in DECE appears to be less than it is for Coral, though once again the details are still to be worked out.  In addition, Comcast, a major US network service provider known for its digital media savvy, is on board -- a good sign, as is the participation of Best Buy, a leading CE retailer.  However, the policy decisions regarding rights locker portability are also not finalized.  Hollywood understandably does not want any downstream link in the content value chain to have control of customers, but at the same time, service providers need enough reasons to participate. 

The next level of details about DECE are expected to emerge around the CES trade show in January 2009.  These include a consumer-friendly name for the technology, which the consortium has hired a branding agency to create.  DECE also hopes to add more influential companies to the membership list by then.  Accordingly, we will withhold any speculation of DECE's chances for success until more concrete information emerges.