Class 8-DRM ah-ha : I've been thinking about it since Thursday, and I honestly I can't really remember an instance where I've run into a DRM/incompatibility problem myself. At least with streaming media...Hmm, makes me wonder if I heard the blog assignment correctly or not. I donno. I've run into the Regional coding issue for DVD, when I've come back from Thailand a few times and it's coded on Region 3(?) I think. In terms of paying for streaming material, the only problem I've had is when I paid for a Charlie Rose interview on Google Video, and its encoded in a non-standard format, it looks like. Didn't play on my home computer. But still, for the most part, most everything I've experienced works as expected.

I know there are incompatabilities out there. It's a fine line: to allow your product to play on the competition's platform verses strictly on your own. Basically, if companies want to allow easier access to their product, they're going to have to give up some control. It gets more complicated the more 'digital and ethereal' audio & video get. They're no longer 'tangible' products anymore, really. But people are starting to expect fluidity between systems as a given this day in age. The BluRay HDDVD war is sure to have a winner. Uniformity in IT is becoming more and more of a necessity.