Macrovision sees a future home where a menu will appear on the TV set that would list
1. What’s on pay-TV tonight, a TV Guide that would also let the user select shows for recording on a DVR.
2. What’s available on the worldwide Net for rent or purchase.
3. What’s new on your DVR and PC that you or someone else may have stored.
4. TV shows and movies on the Net that you can stream for free.
Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) proponents like Macrovision see a future home where every device – from set-top boxes to TV sets and PCs – comes with DLNA built-in. They’ll be capable of discovering and connecting to every other DLNA-capable device on the home’s networks, wired and wireless, and then send and/or receive data between each other.
When a TV set like Samsung’s new DLNA-equipped LN46A750 ($1,881 with free shipping at Amazon.com) is plugged into the home network, it will, for example, find and allow the user to view and play photos, music and videos that are stored on a DLNA-equipped PC or a pay-TV set-top box.
Macrovision licenses DLNA technology, the stuff it got when it bought Mediabolic some years back, to makers of consumer electronics (CE) gear that don’t want to develop their own version of the open DLNA standard.
Macrovision Connected Platform is the name Macrovision has given the Mediabolic technology it acquired.
Most recently, Cisco’s Scientific-Atlanta unit has taken a license and expects to have DLNA in every set-top box it makes for North America by mid-2009. Whether every pay-TV company that Scientific-Atlanta sells to will opt to enable DLNA, well, that’s a different question. PCs that run Windows Media 11 are fully DLNA compliant.
Macrovision’s chief evangelist Richard Bullwinkle told us that all DLNA equipment should be fully compatible with each other. DLNA has very little to do with user interfaces, Bullwinkle said. Each CE maker will have to buy or develop its own user menus that show what content is available and allow the user to select what he wants to see or hear. DLNA, he said, is more about discovering other DLNA-capable gear on the home’s network and transmitting data like video, pictures and movies from one device to another.
All of the data on one DLNA box is available to the other DLNA boxes for viewing and listening, he said, but not for copying if it’s copy-protected.
Even with the PC turned off, a DLNA-equipped TV set, for example, could connect to a DLNA-capable media server, like the one Buffalo Technologies plans to introduce, that’s connected to the home network and then play or show any video, music or digital picture. Buffalo Technologies also plans to have a $100 or so DLNA box that could play video that’s stored on a pay-TV set-top box that’s DLNA-compliant. Bullwinkle expects there to be DLNA-compatible portable media players on the market in 2009.
DLNA, even though it has a small marketing budget, could find itself as well recognized as Wi-Fi in a couple of years’ time if its uptake by CE makers is a rapid as Bullwinkle expects.
Using DLNA technology to connect devices and make data transmissions easy is only half of what Macrovision sees as its opportunity. It wants to offer a service that will make media metadata available to all that CE gear, too. Users would, in theory, be able to find, say, where a particular movie or TV show is available – on a pay-TV network or somewhere on the Internet like at CinemaNow or Amazon Unbox. To that end it acquired All Media Guide (November 2007) and TV Guide (May 2008).
All Media Guide (AMG) owns and maintains Allmusic, All Game Guide and All Movie Guide, comprehensive databases of metadata for movies, music, video games and audio books. According to the company, the databases are used for point-of-sale systems in tens of thousands of stores globally, for CD and DVD recognition in software media players such as Windows Media Player, SimpleCenter and Musicmatch Jukebox and for providing content for a variety of Web sites.
AMG’s LASSO is a media recognition service that automatically recognizes CDs, DVDs and digital audio files such as MP3, Ogg, AAC, and WMA files. Once a song, movie or TV show is recognized, metadata from AMG’s Allmusic and All Movie databases is delivered directly to the player.
LASSO is available as a software developer kit (SDK) for PC software developers. An embedded version of LASSO is available for consumer electronics devices.
All Media Guide also has a recommendation engine for music. “If you liked this band in its early years, you’ll also like XXX,” for example.
TV Guide, the other media-focused acquisition, has the most comprehensive guide to TVs shows, what they’re about, the cast and when and where they are to be shown. To that TV Guide is adding shows’ availability on the Net, both purchase to download and ad-supported streaming.
Turning on the TV set and asking for a movie or TV show would cause Macrovision’s media service to spring into action: it would list upcoming show times on pay-TV, Web sites where it could be purchased or rented (CinemaNow and Amazon Unbox so far with Napster probably next) and search for it on the home PCs and network-attached media servers.
It’s database would, in theory, have metadata about every movie ever made, every song, every TV show and every video game.
If you refer back to the hypothetical menu that Macrovision hopes to see on TVs in the future, you might do well to add “except for Apple” after each.
That’s because Apple has never licensed its iTunes technology or its FairPlay copy-protection scheme to anyone. No other device or media player can access iTunes. None can play content that’s copy protected by Apple’s FairPlay DRM.
But, just as Apple had to make its iPods, iPhones and Apple TVs capable of playing MP3 tracks because they have become a universal standard, there’s always a slim hope that it’ll join the rest of the media world. Apple may be the largest seller of music – including retail stores – but it has not yet shown dominance in video entertainment. In fact, its Apple TV product is off to a much slower sales ramp-up than Apple partisans might have expected.
In any event, there are lots of CE makers, online music and movie services and content producers that are ready to fill in where Apple missed.
Macrovision wants to supply those CE makers with the technology and media services they need.