Metering

A device based on PlayReady can meter content usage—count the number of times a content file is used. 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 100th 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 is not used to track the listening habits of individual users; this feature maintains user privacy. Only the metering data is collected and sent to the metering aggregation service. At no time does Microsoft access this data. User actions for which metering data is collected include the number of times a content file is copied and the number of times it is played.

Each content service typically has its own unique Metering ID and Metering Certificate that ensure that each PlayReady device securely returns metering data to a particular metering service only for the content that it acquired from that service. (The license contains the unique Metering ID.)