Metering Content Usage

Using Windows Media 10 technology, media players on computers and devices can meter content—that is, count the number of times content is used (for example, played or copied). Metering provides several benefits, the greatest of which is to reduce royalty fees for those content provider services that license content and then resell it to their customers. Royalty fees are based on the type of sale, such as whether the sale is a permanent transfer or a metered single play. The cost of a metered single play is less than one percent of the cost of a permanent transfer, so a customer would need to play a song more than 100 times before the metered single-play royalty fee would equal the cost of a permanent transfer. The difference in royalty fees becomes more noticeable when a service provides users with access to a large catalog of music, such as 10,000 songs. Because many songs will never be listened to, paying for metered single-play transactions is much more economical.

Metering also provides other benefits. For example, metering allows those artists whose content is played to be identified and paid. Metering can also be used to track the number of times an advertisement is viewed.

Metering is not used to track the listening habits of individual users, and at no time does Microsoft access metering data.

This section contains the following topics.

Topic	Description
How Metering Works	Describes how the metering aggregation service and media player collect and report metering data.
Generating a License for Metered Content	Describes how the license issuer generates a license for metered content.
Hosting a Metering Aggregation Service	Describes how to set up a metering aggregation service to collect metering data.

For additional information and sample code, see the Technical Articles on the Digital Rights Management page at the Microsoft Web site.

See Also

• Programming Guide