Funny this: this Reuters story is supposed to be embargoed until Monday but somehow got published tonight (the news was previously reported last month by Techcrunch). Anyway, the story: a bunch of media, entertainment and consumer electronics companies are working together on something called "Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem", or DECE, which is a set of standards to develop a uniform media device ecosystem, the tenth such effort over the years. The details will apparently be announced at CES in Jan next year.

The consortium will call for interoperability of devices and websites and usage rules that allow consumers to copy content onto household playback devices and to burn their content to physical media, DECE President Mitch Singer told Reuters. Singer was previously the CTO of Sony Pictures Entertainment. The plans also calls for giving users a virtual locker for storing their digital media, though with everyone providing virtual storage now, not sure how relevant that is anymore. Also, with shades of MSFT's PlaysForSure, the group will have a logo which any company in the consortium could use to convey to consumer that devices are interoperable with various services. Good luck with that one…

The group includes Alcatel-Lucent, Best Buy, Cisco, Comcast, News Corp's Fox Entertainment Group, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lions Gate Entertainment, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Viacom's Paramount Pictures, Philips, Sony, Toshiba, VeriSign, and Time Warner's Warner Bros. Guess the company everyone's aiming for who isn't in there…

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