So Tech.co.uk is reporting that Apple is going to start opening up their FairPlay DRM to ‘Made for iPod’ licensees. They claim Apple will be making two announcements, possibly this week. First, that they’ll allow streaming of protected AAC content (songs purchases from ITMS). Second, that they’ll be licensing FairPlay DRM.
If this is indeed true, it could be possible for TiVo to offer playback of iTunes music. There are already ways to play AAC music back via your TiVo – there is a plug-in for TiVo Desktop on Windows, and the LAME encoder does the same on MacOS, but this only works for unprotected AAC. Further, if this extends to video content, which is also wrapped with FairPlay, it could be possible for ITMS video content to be transferred to a TiVo. It would have to be transcoded for the Series2 units, but the forthcoming Desktop 2.4 on Windows is supposed to support that. (No word on Macs – hold the snarky comments, OK?) The Series3 hardware can handle H.264 video, which is what ITMS uses, natively. And Jim Denney talked about plans to enable that in the video interview I linked to a couple of days ago. (Like I said, it is worth watching, some good info in there.)
So this is speculation, but if Apple does open things up it creates possibilities.
