A coalition of manufacturers that includes Panasonic, Samsung, SanDisk, Sony and Toshiba announced early this week that they have reached an agreement in principal to jointly develop security for flash memory devices such as SD cards and other storage devices.

Dubbed "Next Generation Secure Memory Initiative," the effort entails the creation of techniques to protect high-definition content on such media. The companies say it will be based on public key infrastructure and will involve the use of unique IDs presumably built into compatible storage devices. The upside is that this would allow HD content from movie studios to be shared with devices such as smartphones and tablets.

In a statement, Hiroshi Yoshioka, Sony's corporate executive officer: "We believe the secure solution created by this initiative will enable customers to enjoy high quality experiences anytime, anywhere. Sony has always been focused on bringing amazing experiences to people through highly-advanced technologies in content creation, content distribution and picture display."

Of course, while it would be nice to have more content available on new platforms, it remains to be seen how this will pan out. Lori Grunin of CNET, for one, is skeptical, "because no matter how you spin it, DRM is designed to mollify the seller, not improve the experience for the buyer, and usually just annoys the latter."

The companies expect to start licensing the new secure memory technology by early next year with solutions leveraging the technology to arrive in the market in 2012.

For more:
- check out this article at CNET News
- check out this article at Computerworld

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