The Rogers MusicStore features full-fidelity tracks from Universal and Warner Music labels, encoded with aacPlus compression. Although Rogers is Melodeo's first North American customer, Melodeo also provides services for Telefónica Móviles España in Spain.

In reality, with most of the supported handset models (from Motorola and Nokia), the Rogers MusicStore functions like the service that AT&T Wireless launched in the US last year.  That is, consumers orders music from their phones and it's delivered to their PCs in Windows Media format.  But with the Nokia 6620, a phone selling for CAD 130 (US $104), consumers can receive music tracks over wireless connections and store and play them on their phones.  This is a first for the North American continent, while several such services already exist in Europe and the Pacific Rim. 

Melodeo's proprietary DRM uses AES encryption and supports the right to play the music on the user's phone.  A user can send an encrypted file to another user, whose phone must contact a server over the wireless network in order to pay for the file and decrypt the file for playback. 

The PC-based and handset-based music commerce modes have a good deal of infrastructure in common, so it's understandable why Rogers Wireless decided to build both kinds of services. Yet there is a yawning chasm of difference between them as far as the consumer is concerned.  The ability to purchase songs on a mobile phone and have them delivered via PC is just a yawn.  But actual delivery and playback on the mobile handset is a crossing of the chasm in North America. 

The launch of this service with Melodeo's technology -- ahead of any such services that use the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) standards for download and DRM -- begs the question of whether the OMA standards will actually take hold in the North American market.  History teaches us that proprietary and vertically integrated technology stacks like Melodeo's are usually only successful in the early stages of a market, to be replaced by component technologies based on open or de facto standards.  Melodeo appears to understand this: it has implied that it will support the OMA standards once its customers start offering compliant handsets. 

Yet we find it a bit mystifying that secure wireless content distribution is being treated as such an early market when so many services have been launched outside North America.  Is the wireless infrastructure -- including billing, identity management, and other software functions -- that much different, or is this simply an example of American chauvinism? 

One reason often given for the slowness of growth in the mobile music market in the US, compared to Europe (especially northern Europe), is the superiority of the wireless infrastructure over there.  It will be interesting to see how good an experience Canadian customers have with true mobile music over the new Melodeo-powered service; such experience should presage that of US consumers when true mobile music services finally -- finally -- launch in this country.

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