miniMAMF said:
Interesting article. I had no idea that many devices other than the iPod plays AAC.
"That many"? He only named something like four. The non-DRM iTunes music
still won't play on 99-plus percent of the non-iPod players (including car CDs, DVD players, etc). It'll just be easier (and legal) to transcode.
It certainly will give the competition a reason to support AAC - since iTMS music was always restricted before (and nothing else used AAC), there wasn't much need to support it. All the legal issues with MP3 as of late make it more appealing as a standard as well.
From what I understand, AAC is not particularly better than MP3 at that high bitrate, so it doesn't really help users at all. For them, its mostly an extra hassle with transcoding and trying to figure out what does and doesn't support AAC. It was easy before - if it wasn't by Apple, its support of iTMS was zero.
WMA isn't a standard - its proprietary. There may be a "standards war", but it will be AAC vs MP3, as those are the most common standards. Without DRM, there isn't much need for WMA. How much this
really impacts Microsoft depends on their profits from licensing vs development costs, which the author didn't mention.
It'll be interesting to see how many users leave their iTunes set to use DRM. If most iTMS music continues to be sold with DRM (perhaps because its cheaper and/or neophytes don't really understand DRM or bitrates), record companies may just decide that people don't mind DRM.