Microsoft certainly thinks so. Tech Digest features an interview with Jim Alkove, Microsoft’s Senior Director Technical Strategy, who puts the DRM scheme into perceptive. Much of the interview reads as a primer on the technology, but it’s valuable to have straight answers from the source. PlayReady, which is referred to an an access technology,” supports a range of business models, including subscriptions, rentals, purchases, pay-per-view and preview, for a wide variety of content types well beyond music and video. It will be available in the first half of this year for device implementations, and Alkove expects “we’ll start to see volumes of handsets coming through sometime in 2008.” (Alkove noted operator partners include Bouygues Telecom, Telefonica, O2, Cingular and Verizon. Because PlayReady is platform-agnostic, it can also show up in a wide range of devices with an OS other than Windows Mobile 6.)

The interview also details the various scenarios for content superdistribution and bundling, which PlayReady would support through more transparent content access, Alkove says. To this end PlayReady allows a concept called “domains.” In a nutshell, the feature enables content to be licensed to the user as a group of devices, rather than individual devices as it is today. As a result, a user with several phones, a PC and a laptop, for example, would be granted permission to move the content among those devices (as they have been authorised by the service). “That’s an offering decision that the operators will make, but PlayReady enables it, he said.

According to Alkove, Microsoft is exploring use cases in connection with a range of content types, including user-generated content. “Content access technology has recently been pigeonholed into this music discussion, but the reality is it’s much broader. It’s really about enabling digital goods and commerce between consumers and operators….”