Well We Had To Put Them All Somewhere…

February 24, 2007

I was at our local Best Buy store and noticed a large “Plays For Sure” display in the aisle.

As you may know, “Plays For Sure” is the “Interoperable DRM” scheme that Microsoft had come up with. The idea was that companies would license PlaysForSure technology from Microsoft and build their players with it.

That way people could buy players and know, just know, that they would work. Then they could mount up the troops and attack Mount iPod in a unified front.

Pretty clever plan, actually.

Yeah. Until Microsoft decided to make their own player (the Zune) and decided to, um, well, I hate to break it to you, but they decided to go another way. One imagines that Microsoft tried to console them with the ol’ “It’s not you, it’s me.”

How is that going for them? Well, we’ve already seen iPod accessories being sold on a Zune display and now we have this footage of at least one PlaysForSure display (and I presume there are many, many more) which is now loaded to the gills with iPod accessories and iTunes Gift Cards..


  • Houlihan
    That's actually just a regular "Ginsu" rack - most electronics retailers (and I've managed a few for several different big box retailers) use them. The "Plays For Sure" branding on the side is something that can easily be changed out, and is a type of paid advertising that retailers use to help out on the bottom line.
    Most likely the store you were in either forgot to remove the PFS branding before stocking it for their iPods, or they just didn't care and the direction from headquarters was "fill it with mp3 accessories". One or the other.
    At retail, you're selling 7 or 8 iPods out of every 10 mp3 players sold. You fish where the fish are, so to speak.
  • Ryan
    Thats a normal BB display sled - it just happens to have Zune ads on the ends. It's not a MS display just MS ads. Although when MS paid to have those ads on a sled in the "racetrack" they probably also paid to have their product placed on it...
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