LOS ANGELES — Developers from as many as 100 companies are expected to meet with representatives of the powerful Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) today (Feb. 26) to start work on a plan to deliver secure music over the Internet.

While several companies, including Sony and Toshiba, planned to propose their own encryption approaches as the basis of tomorrow's Net audio players, many manufacturers-such as Creative Labs, Sony and Philips-are said to be preparing to enter this burgeoning market later this year whether or not the RIAA's Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) has completed its work.

The rapid growth of Net audio devices such as Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP300 player is providing a heady inducement for systems makers to jump into the market. Companies that opt to bring out players before SDMI's decision risk developing a product incompatible with a standard that's backed by major content providers who are part of the group formed last December. They include BMG, EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music.

In addition, the RIAA has sued-so far unsuccessfully-Diamond because its Rio uses the widely available MP3 (MPEG-1, Audio Layer 3) technology that compresses but does not copy-protect audio files.

Mark Hardie, analyst at Forrester Research, estimates there may be 12 portable digital audio players on the market by year's end. He expects 1 million to 2 million units will be sold by Christmas, against less than 200,000 today. Hardie estimates that 150,000 of the players now in use are Diamond Rios. Two other MP3 players from South Korean manufacturers-the Yepp from Samsung Electronics and the MPMan from Saehan Information Systems Inc.-are the only other two major offerings available.

In this environment, a host of companies are simultaneously proposing new security schemes to SDMI and preparing their own players for launch in the next few months. Sony Corp. proposed its MagicGate as a basis for the SDMI this week, while Toshiba Corp. will propose its ID scheme to the SSFDC Forum, the SmartMedia standardization body.

Sony plans to ship a so-called Memory Stick Walkman later this year that uses its gum-stick-sized flash storage cards and a suite of copy-protection technology dubbed MagicGate. Sony will embed a MagicGate chip into its audiovisual-oriented flash cards used both in players and recorders to handle encryption and authentication. All content is transmitted and stored in encrypted format; decryption uses a public-key system.

A version of the technology known as OpenMG consists of a module geared to allow playback on a PC of copy-protected music stored locally on a hard drive or other device while preventing transmission of the music over a network. Sony plans to roll out these technologies within a year and hopes to license MagicGate technologies widely. A follow-on called Super MagicGate is positioned as a comprehensive solution for content distribution over networks, ensuring secured distribution and fare collection, according to a Sony spokesman.

Like Sony, Toshiba will leverage its flash storage approach, the so-called SmartMedia cards, as the basis of its audio security scheme. Toshiba has already started offering samples of its NAND flash chips with an embedded 128-bit ID number written on an unused memory block as the basis for security on the cards. Before a card ships, the ID numbers are written on-chip by a special permanent process.

"The memory will find strong demands for applications such as downloading audio content and as an electronic-book distribution system," said a Toshiba spokesman.

The numbered SmartMedia cards form the basis of a Net security scheme, InfoBind, developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT) and Kobe Steel Ltd. for their planned SolidAudio player and NTT's Infoket e-commerce platform. InfoBind encrypts digital music using the ID number unique to each SmartMedia card and distributes the content over networks for playback on SolidAudio devices that use the ID number as the key.

"NTT is going to propose its copy-protection technology in the near future to international bodies for standardization," said an NTT spokesman. The two companies also are inviting partners in Japan and overseas to establish a secured audio-content delivery system.

Other contenders
In addition, online music provider Liquid Audio, which announced a portable digital audio player reference design with Texas Instruments Inc. this week, said it planned to submit a piece of the reference design to SDMI. Other technologies that might be considered include IBM's Electronic Music Management System, which is being used in a trial in San Diego for 1,000 cable-modem subscribers, and an entry from InterTrust Technologies Corp. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits. They have allied to provide rights management and protection technology for Fraunhofer's MP3 and AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) compression algorithms.

IBM's San Diego trial is being conducted with the five major music companies that founded SDMI. The InterTrust-Fraunhofer alliance will mean manufacturers can go to Fraunhofer for the MP3 or AAC codecs and get a rights-management system integrated with it.

Leonardo Chiariglione, convenor of the MPEG group, was today named executive director of SDMI. Sources said SDMI won't choose a winning technology, but will pick a very rudimentary level of copy protection and security technology with which digital hardware players and music providers will have to comply to gain certification.

As the talks go on, vendors are prepping a slew of music players. A spokesman for Creative Labs said the company intends to introduce its own branded MP3 hardware player by summer. Sources said Philips is also working on a player.

Lucent Technologies said it commissioned e.Digital (San Diego) to develop a player that will use Lucent's Enhanced Perceptual Audio Coder compression technology. EPAC includes digital watermarking from Cognicity and Lucent's own secure copy-protection system.