Microsoft decided to put an end to its development of Windows Media Player for the Mac and has no plans to develop any alternative for the Mac. While the PC version has reached version 10 over a year back, the Mac OS X version has remained at version 9 since its launch in November 2003. Microsoft mentioned that they made this decision to give priority towards delivering the best experience towards Windows customers. Windows Media Player 9 will remain available for download, however Microsoft will no longer offer support for it.
In an aim to provide an alternative to Windows Media Player, Microsoft has announced a deal with Telestream to offer a free Flip4Mac plug-in for QuickTime. This will allow the playback of Windows Media 9 audio and video content as well as high definition content in QuickTime, however there are no plans to offer any DRM support, which means that it cannot be used with subscription content and music services such as Napster, Yahoo!, where the Windows Media tracks have copy protection, time limits, etc. The same goes with copy protected CDs that use DRM protected WMA tracks. Flip4Mac is only free for playback as the product costs $29 to allow the importing of non-protected WMA/WMV files and $49 for basic WMA/WMV encoding support.
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"We have no plans to provide future updates or product support for Windows Media Player for Mac," Adam Anderson, Microsoft public relations manager, said in an interview Thursday. The company will continue to offer the current version for download. It also has announced a deal to offer for free the Flip4Mac plug-in from Telestream that will allow Mac OS X users to play Windows Media video and audio directly from Apple's QuickTime Player software. |
By planning to drop DRM support for the Mac is a clear
sign that Microsoft is trying to force Mac users to switch over to a PC with its
OS if they want to use protected Windows Media services. While the Mac market is
very small compared with the PC market, Microsoft is probably forgetting that
iTunes became a major success when it started off as a Mac-only
music service.
Source: c|net news - Digital Life
