Macrovision, CinemaNow Partner
By Greg Tarr -- TWICE, 1/3/2008
Santa Clara, Calif. — Macrovision and CinemaNow said Thursday they have integrated their technologies to offer consumers downloads of CinemaNow premium video directly to Macrovision-enabled consumer electronics devices, including digital television sets, set-top boxes, and network attached storage (NAS) devices.
Through the collaboration, users who have registered their Macrovision-enabled hardware at CinemaNow.com will be able to use those devices to watch movies, TV shows and music videos from CinemaNow’s large online library of available programming.
Macrovision plans to make its middleware solutions available to consumer electronics manufacturers who wish to produce devices that can access CinemaNow online premium video content. Macrovision said this marks the first time a middleware video on demand solution has been broadly made available to manufacturers.
Macrovision’s technology will also enable the devices to find, stream and playback other personal content stored elsewhere on a user’s in-home network.
The integration combines Macrovision’s Connected Platform technology and CinemaNow’s proprietary digital entertainment distribution technology.
“We have been working diligently for the past several years to create some technology capabilities as well as content rights offerings around what we’ve got to help us facilitate that,” Curt Marvis, CinemaNow CEO told TWICE. “While we’ve done certain deals with company’s including HP, EchoStar, Samsung and others that we’ve previously announced, the great part of the Macrovision relationship for us is it significantly broadens our ability to bring CinemaNow to a larger number of hardware providers.”
Macrovision’s Connected Platform is billed as a comprehensive and flexible software solution that enables consumer devices to acquire streamed music, photos and video from PCs and networked storage devices. It is a component of the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) standard and is compliant to the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) standard.
“CE manufacturers are realizing that content is king and their devices are only as good as the content that they can access,” stated Eric Free, Macrovision Embedded Solutions Business Unit executive VP and general manager. “Through teaming up with CinemaNow, we’re providing CE manufacturers with new services that simplify the process of acquiring content for the home and enriching consumers’ experience with digital entertainment.”
The companies said Hollywood studios have encouraged the development of systems that will help them distribute their content securely through a broad range of devices. Content distributed through the arrangement will carry digital rights management instructions established by the copyright holders.
“The studios are very interested in building the digital video category. I think everyone recognizes the digital business is still in its fledgling stages and certainly they are not interested in having Apple dominate the digital video side of the business the way they do in the music space,” said Trent Wheeler, Macrovision product management director. “We’ve received a lot of support and receptivity from the studios in building out solutions of this sort.”
Most of CinemaNow’s content is available in standard definition, but the Macrovision system can be extended to support high definition as well, as that becomes more available, Wheeler said.
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