Content protection specialist Macrovision has been very quiet of late but this week said it has signed agreements with 4 online video providers, Netflix, BitTorrent, Movielink and Instant Media, which will use Macrovision’s content protection technology. Mostly they will just take the ACP analog content protection to add to other digital content protections they already have. Macrovision also announced a deal with games company Activision this week and introduced some new gaming content protection tools.
ACP is an instruction that works with most consumer electronic equipment to increase gain in one of more controls when an analog file is created at playout from a digital file. This means that although the file will play perfectly on a TV screen for instance, the resulting file, if stored, will either be fuzzy or be black and white, when played on another device, or have a noise going through the soundtrack or all of the above.
Macrovision ACP is often mandated by content companies whenever they give rights for online delivery of video files.
The Netflix service was launched in January after three years of development and after going into beta during mid 2005, it has 1,000 movies online available to a small subset of the Netflix 5 million subscriber base, but is gradually being made available to all of them by this June.
Macrovision also announced a deal with Activision this week to distribute a catalog of its PC games on Macrovision’s games network.
Under this agreement Macrovision will distribute the Call of Duty genre of games Vampire-The Masquerade: Bloodlines, The Movies, among others, to more than 300 online distribution channels worldwide that are part of its games network.
Macrovision also introduced Game Access Control and Game Promotion and Loyalty to help game publishers quickly package, protect and distribute games.
Game Access Control allows the distribution of copies of purchasable game trials on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, without them being pirated and the Game Promotion and Loyalty system allows game publishers to gain further revenue from in-game advertising, while also distributing game updates directly to customers.