Should Apple license FairPlay?

I wrote a post the other day about how (apparently) the BBC were none too amused that Apple isn’t willing to budge in terms of licensing FairPlay DRM. The context of the post was that the BBC iPlayer team, on the back of uproarious success in the last 12 months, were seeking to add download functionality to the iPhone, on top of the current streaming solution.

Having a streaming-only solution limits you to a watch-now type deal, and that’s really only if you have WiFi handy. With download, place-shifting and time-shifting of TV shows that the BBC has becomes a reality. However, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) would not play ball and give out the info needed to utilise FairPlay.

As an end-user, I don’t use iPlayer at all on my iPhone – precisely because of the above reason – I don’t want to watch programmes on-demand, it doesn’t interest me at all. What I want to do is select a catalogue of content, that can be downloaded to my device largely whenever. I’ll then pick and choose what to ‘snack’ on, in terms of viewing, when I have a bit of free time.

So the question arises as to whether Apple are doing the right or wrong thing in keeping FairPlay to themselves…

Looking at things from a purely business perspective, Apple are doing exactly the right thing – if you own the entire delivery system, and you have it locked down, then why would you compromise it by having third parties use it? Not only would it present a technical weakness, but Apple’s other business models could potentially suffer. It’s suggested that iTunes doesn’t make that much profit (as compared with the hardware sales of iPods and the like), so breaking the iTunes revenue stream in any small way doesn’t make sense.

But of course appreciating Apple’s business strategy doesn’t make the end-user’s life any easier – I’d like iPlayer truly multi-platform, and it’s infuriating knowing that the BBC are well up for it – it’s just Apple that won’t “PlayFair” (do you see what I did there with that, reversing the word “FairPlay”… ok… nevermind!).

Seriously though, other manufacturers (a la Nokia (NYSE: NOK)) have stepped in and enabled download of iPlayer content for the N96 – and I’m sure we’ll see more manufacturers moving the same direction. But Apple is known for marching to it’s own beat, so I expect we are going to have to just wait up until a point where big changes come. And sometimes they can come – a few years back, no-one envisaged DRM-free tracks in iTunes, but, eventually it did happen!

What do you guys think? Should Apple open things up? Or are they right to maintain a closed ecosystem?

Ben