Just to show that Microsoft is not the only one that will be leaving some of its past customers with unplayable purchased content, according to last100, Major League Baseball, Google, Sony and Virgin have already done something similar to its past customers that either has resulted or will result in unplayable legitimately purchased content.
Major League Baseball upgraded its DRM system, which made all video content purchased before 2006 becoming unplayable, including content written to CD. Unlike MSN Music where the DRM authenticates with each significant hardware change, this video authenticated each time it was played. It took over 7 months before MLB finally sorted out the issue with some of its affected customers after plenty of complaining. Google's video service resulted in a similar issue when it closed its video download store. They initially offered credit for its Checkout service, but eventually offered full credit card refunds once its move resulted in a media and user backlash.
Up until recently Sony really tried hard to push its ATRAC format upon consumers. However, while it was once the market leader for its Walkman cassette player, unfortunately they failed to grab much market share for its digital audio players. As a result, Sony finally decided to add support for the MP3 format in its players in recent years and more recently announced that it planned ditching its proprietary DRM format altogether. Now the company is recommending customers to back up its music libraries to audio CD, which is a fairly good indication that it may later stop supporting its Sony Connect DRM.
Virgin media which has already shutdown its Digital music store and DRM authentication server, has advised its customers to backup their purchased content to CD to remove the defunct DRM.
Finally, while Microsoft has announced the end of "PlaysForSure" logo late last year, this DRM format is not going to disappear just because MSN Music plans closing its DRM authentication servers. In fact, to make matters more confusing, the logo has been replaced with Microsoft's "Certified For Windows Vista" logo, i.e. Microsoft’s polite way of saying “DRM inside”. As a result, any music store or audio/media player has a "Certified For Windows Vista" basically means that it is using the renamed "PlaysForSure" DRM. A few examples of music stores still using this DRM include Napster, Real Rhapsody and Yahoo Music.
