As always happens at events like CES, we hear the big announcements, the ones made by the companies with the big budgets, large stands and organized media relations, and then gradually the smaller deals, some of which are more significant than those announced by the traditional brands, seep through.
Looking back at the announcements made by codec designer DivX since it bought Germany’s H.264 MainConcept codec supplier in mid-December, it is clear that it has something of a concerted campaign to put the DivX DRM, codecs and media platform on a cluster of devices, aimed at taking content straight to TVs, set tops and home gateways, securely, much like the Macrovision announcements regarding its Connected Platform (see elsewhere in this issue).
It has also signed a number of content partners, and is rapidly building an eco-system for secure content delivery, much in line with its stated mission from about 3 years ago. However the most recent signing of Sony Pictures Television means it has finally hit the big league and all of the Hollywood studios could be about to follow. The Sony deal will enable online retailers to offer Sony Pictures titles for secure download in DivX format.
The big difference between DivX and say, Apple cutting deals with studios, is that DivX has a history to overcome, having given away its codecs for free for years, and many content pirates using them as a standard format for distribution. But at the same time there is immense momentum among the young and there is a lot of DivX know how in the marketplace. The company approached studios years ago and asked what it had to do to get access to mainstream content online, and was told that it had to put in place a specific type of DRM, something it did as long ago as three years, convincing handfuls of European consumer electronic firms to put the platform into DVD players, and DVRs. Google Video also opted to use the DivX DRM rather than one from Microsoft.
As such DivX was perhaps ahead of its time and only signed up a small amount of content and device makers, but now it has revived that initiative, signing up Broadcom for set top chips, AMD ‘s ATI for its most recent set top family and D-Link wireless home gateway devices, as well as LG television sets and the Sony PS3 games console, all to play DivX files. It doesn’t specify what these DivX files are, whether they are those generated by the traditional DivX codec, or by the new MainConcept H.264 codec, but we suspect that at some stage they will be able to read both. Interestingly the MainConcept codec is at the heart of the Intel based H.264 implementation for Adobe Flash Video on its Flash player, so some DivX outputs should also be viewable with PC based Flash and handset based Flash Lite.
The AMD agreement is really with subsidiary ATI, and puts DivX video technology on Xilleon processors which are designed to power next-generation digital TVs Xilleon is a system-on-a-chip built around the MIPS CPU, with a HD video decoder, audio decoder, and onboard conditional access, aimed at set-tops, digital TVs, and home media gateways.
Earlier in January Broadcom announced the DivX Certification on its Broadcom BCM7403 chip for HD set-top devices and back in November D-Link announced the DSM-330 DivX Connected HD Media Player for delivery in the first half of 2008, and at CES, Ubicom another provider of communications processors, said it would put DivX into its StreamEngine 5000 processor.
Other content deals for DivX include one with Art House online movie service Jaman and the US based Vuze online entertainment platform, both of which will embrace the DivX format. DivX has also signed up Next New Networks, the Indie content supplier, which creates branded micro-networks on the Internet. Again this will use the DivX Connected platform.
It is always difficult to predict how new markets open up ‘ Faultline said that 2006 would be the year of the legal download, but despite many services being launched, it never happened ‘ but we’re pretty sure that the persistence of the DivX vision, which was probably the first company to see the potential of the online film industry, will emerge in the mix somewhere. The quality of the DivX online video is pretty fantastic, and the relationships that makes these licensing deals possible now go back around 5 or 6 years and it will be very hard for anybody to unseat DivX in the minds of the film watching youth market.