Zune does “plays for sure”?

Michael Gartenberg | November 30, 2006, 08:34 AM

It seems that Zune and Plays for Sure are closely related indeed. While the Zune player will not accept content from other Plays for Sure services it seems content from the Zune marketplace will work on other Plays for Sure compatible devices (it’s clearly not something supported and certainly not clear how long it will work). Interesting. I would guess that the technology is the same but that the Zune player will only recognize content from tagged as from coming from the Zune marketplace while other devices by design, ignore the source of the content and only focus on the DRM. If that’s the case, it’s not clear to me why Microsoft would block partner services from playing on their device (is the goal to create a closed loop system dependent on locking other folks out in terms of quality). Anybody else try this and get it to work? Also, wonder if there’s a meta-tag to change on Urge content, for example that would allow it play on Zune