I believe a closed system will be DOA.
Plus the chances of this being anything really new or innovative are pretty slim.
but heck, thats just the optimist in me talking
I hear ya. I am an "optimist" too. But if the money players are behind it (RIAA & Co.) then it could get traction. Pirating is killing the business and the art, so we are getting to the point of a major shift in delivery. A secure file format is tempting, but you know it will be cracked.
So far nobody has said anything about this being a piracy deterrent, it is just my fantasy. But if Jobs was in on it, there was a licensing angle.
I have always wondered about a unique locked file security system for music, similar to how PGP works. You buy music with your public key, the download server encrypts it so only your private key can play it. You enter your private key into your playback software once, making the PGP process invisible to you and perfectly secure. You own your files, and they are useless to anyone else. My copy of "Billie Jean" is a different file than anybody else's, but decoded with my key it produces the same analog output. Most personal players have a strong processor now to handle the decode. New phones come twice a year, Moore's Law lives.
Streaming content would not work with PGP though. Can't encode live content into millions of unique streams at once, right?