Metering is a technology that enables digital media content providers to track the usage of protected media content. Metering is not generally used to track the listening habits of individual users but is rather a tally of how many times a particular piece of media content item is used (for example, how often the media content is played or copied). Thus, metering can serve a number of possible business models, such as a fee-for-use model, or a subscription model where users pay a periodic fee, (for example, every month) to enjoy limited use of media content selected from an online catalog. If the user chooses not to continue his or her subscription, the licenses for any content simply expire, disabling playback.
A media content provider commonly enables a media player running on a personal computer (“PC”) or mobile device with the capability to collect and report metering data for media content that has been protected with copy protection like digital rights management (“DRM”) technology. Such metering capability may be developed for such platforms, for example, through use of a software development kit (“SDK”) that is licensed from a system developer. Metering provides several benefits, one 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. Since the cost of a metered single play is much less than the cost of a permanent transfer, metering content is often much more economical for the content provider. Metering also provides other benefits. By metering content, a content provider can determine which content is more popular, identify and pay the artists whose content is played, and track the number of times an advertisement is viewed, for example.
Current metering arrangements, while satisfactory in many applications, are typically dependent on a proxy device such as a PC that functions as an intermediary between a metering service and a mobile device using, for example, a docking-type connection. The PC is used to deliver a metering certificate (which identifies the location to which metering data is to be reported) to the mobile device as well as trigger a metering event. However, the mobile device is thus unable to receive a metering certificate and report metering data when it is not coupled to the proxy device.